A brush of fingers on my back and the physical contact after the rough day is like a good soaking in the sun. My muscles melt.

“You go in,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

Logan starts down the stairs, but I stop him. “You can wait in my room. It’s the room at the end of the hallway. I might be a while.”

“Have you eaten?”

Say no. Don’t lean on Logan any more than you have. Today was meant to drive him away.

“I’m hungry, Abby, and need food. If you don’t eat, I don’t eat, and bad things happen when I don’t eat.”

I have to work to keep the laughter to hushed sounds. “Are you a deranged gremlin?”

“Something like that. What do you say? Food?”

“Doesn’t mean I’m letting any of you back in my life.”

My heart flutters when his fingers caress my back again. Logan leans into me and his hot breath dances near the sensitive spot behind my ear. “Doesn’t mean you won’t change your mind.”

Then, as if that moment didn’t happen, Logan jogs down the stairs like touching me didn’t affect him. God, I really do hate him at times.

I take care to be quiet as I walk in, tiptoeing even, too scared that my full weight on the wooden floorboards below will create a sound that would jolt her.

Grams is lying on her back, her head turned to the side, her white hair loose around her shoulders. She’s lost so much weight over the past year that she’s a little more than a bump on the bed and within the past few weeks she’s become a mouth breather. A blessing and a curse. A blessing because I don’t have to wander too far in to make sure she’s still alive when she lies so still, but a curse because I don’t like that it’s so difficult for her to breathe.

I despise that the doctor says her weight loss is normal. That he suggests that her old age is catching up with her and nature is taking its course. As a child, I believed Grams was immortal and I still need her to be.

I had woken up and I was screaming. Even with my eyes open, I still saw her there. The woman in black. The woman who was going to take me away.

“Abby!” Grams rushed into my room, flicking the light on, scaring the nightmare away.

She eased immediately into my bed, shushing me, holding me, caressing my hair. “It’s a bad dream, child. Just a bad dream.”

I sniffled and snuffed and breathed too fast as the tears continued to stream down my face. Grams had continued to talk, her voice calm and I would focus on that sweet sound and then I would focus on her touch and how it never wavered. Grams was nothing like the woman in black. She’d never scare me.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Do we need another fort?”

I nodded and it took a few more minutes for Grams to convince me to let her go as I had clasped my fingers onto her nightgown. I did let her go, believing she wasn’t leaving, and Grams built the fort. The same fort she built for me whenever the nightmare taunted me.

One by one, each and every stuffed animal I owned was placed on the bed, creating a wall between me and the world that scared me.

“We’ll sew tomorrow,” Grams said. “You and I. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

“I’m not good at it,” I whispered as I snuggled deep under the quilt she had made for me. “My stitches are all wrong.”

“Life isn’t about perfection. It’s about spending time with you.”

I was never good at sewing. Stuck my fingers more than I completed a straight stitch. But Grams was forever patient. Forever understanding. Forever there. And because of her faith in me, I always sat still as we worked on a massive quilt together. I cherished that time together. I was hers and she was mine and somehow I belonged.

She opens her eyes and I freeze, praying she doesn’t see me. Praying that she closes them again and drifts back to sleep. But she blinks. Again. A few more times. “Abby?”

My throat locks up and the emotion overwhelms me to the point that tears fill my eyes. “It’s me.”

Her head moves as she looks about her room. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“Yes.” A terrible dream. One that included drug deals, getting shot, making friends and losing friends, falling for someone and letting them go.

“Is your father home?” Grams’s mind, when it decides to function at a reasonable level, resides where she is most comfortable, with me at eight and Dad still taking care of both of us.

Grams hated what Dad did for a living. Every night when Grams tucked me into bed, she told me I would grow up to be better than him. Guess I’m a disappointment.

“No, Dad’s not home yet.” Not ever. The judge seemed pretty serious about that life sentence. “I think he needs to work late tonight.”

“He’s a complicated man,” she says like she believes she has strength, but Grams has none. She lost the ability to stand on her own months ago and can only sit up for so long before shaking. “I hoped when he brought you home that he’d make some changes in his life.”

I remember Grams before her skin was thin and wrinkles covered so much of her face. Her skin is translucent now and her eyes don’t look quite right in her head. The past five years have been brutal, for both of us. I sit on the edge of the bed and tuck her hair behind her ear. “Do you remember when we used to dress up and play tea?”

My best dress, she’d curl my hair, we both wore white gloves.

Grams grants me the same smile she gave to me every morning I woke and every night as I went to bed. “Want to invite your father to tea again? He looks nice when he dresses up.”

The memory of my father bringing home a tux and a “fancy” meal for me and Grams for my seventh birthday is a hug and a knife to the chest. “He told me to take care of you.”

Grams’s eyes flutter as she places her hand over mine. “It’s what he said to me when he brought you home. I’m glad he found you.”

“I’m glad he did, too.”

She closes her eyes, and this time as she sleeps, Grams doesn’t drag in shallow breaths, but deep air through her nose. Eventually, enough time passes that her eyes flicker beneath her closed lids. That moment was a gift. A rare gift. The time period may be off, but she remembered me.

Grams is the only person left who knows me, the real me, and when she forgets, I wonder if the only good things about me will die along with her already fading memories.

Logan

I enter through the back door then lock it behind me, thinking of how Abby was barricading herself in when she walked in earlier. Abby, since I met her, has always been larger than life, that unattainable creature that only exists in myths that pretends to be flesh and blood like the rest of us.

But if seeing her in a hospital bed didn’t convince me, then watching her when she returned home proved Abby’s fragile. Possibly more fragile than anyone else. It’s not the ones that know how to ask for help that can shatter, it’s people like Abby who are made of glass and carry the world on their shoulders that are going to break.

Nate lifts his head from a novel and nods as I stride up the stairs. Her grandmother’s door is closed and a light shines from beneath Abby’s at the end of the hallway.

Isaiah and I had a long talk this afternoon and neither of us is happy. What’s going to happen next depends on Abby’s answers to conversations she’s not going to want to have. I lightly knock on the door and at her answer of “Come in,” I open the door.

First thing I notice is pink wallpaper and the next thing I notice—bare skin.

Blood flow in my body redirects south and I can’t stop staring at the curve of her naked back. Abby’s dark hair is wet, making it longer and black. She eases a tank over her head, then pulls it down until that delicious skin is covered.

She glances over her shoulder at me and that devilish grin that sucks me in is on her lips. I clear my throat, because...yeah...that shut down most of my brain processes. “Trying to seduce me?”

“Not really, but it was fun. If you’re going to be insistent on being annoying, then you can help me out.” She walks over to her bed, picks up a bandage, and waves it in the air. “I’ve got a nice entry wound I can’t reach.”

Abby hops up onto the high bed, sits in the middle with her back toward me, sweeps her hair over her shoulder, then tugs at her tank top to reveal the bandage. I set the bag of food on the dresser and head over to join her. Don’t miss that I’m about to get into a bed with Abby.

I take the bandage from her and begin the process of peeling the old one off. “You’re doing this to scare me off, but it won’t work.”

“Just need help, Logan. I’m not nearly as manipulative as you think.”

Bet she’s more. “You have a trained nurse downstairs who could do this better. You’re trying to prove being around you is dangerous.”

“It is,” she says simply.

I focus on trying not to hurt her when removing the bandage, but the fastest and most human way is a quick rip. Abby sucks in a breath as she straightens and my fingers lightly massage her skin. The wound is smaller than I would have expected. Raw, light red, and the skin surrounding it is bruised.

Memories of the first few months of diabetes shots and how sore I was causes me to lean forward and kiss her soft skin an inch above where she hurts. Abby’s breathing hitches again, but this time, it’s not from pain.