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  Stella pressed Gage’s pillow to her face, but there was no smell of him. Nothing left. Something twisted and broke inside her at this, though it was no surprise. She clutched it and waited to be overtaken again by her tears, but there weren’t any left. She’d worn herself out.

  Stella curled up on Gage’s bed, the pillow beneath her head. She slept almost at once.

  * * *

  She woke in the morning feeling a little as if she’d been hit in the face with a shovel. All over her body, as a matter of fact, all her normal aches and pains somehow exacerbated and emphasized as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and tried to force herself to her feet. Stella scrubbed at her face and pushed herself up with a wince.

  In the pale light of morning, Gage’s room looked so much smaller than she remembered. Stella went to the dresser, running her fingertips along the dust on the surface. His collection of toy cars was still lined up along the back of it, though there were empty places in the lineup. Tristan had taken those cars, and Stella closed her eyes against a fresh spate of tears that threatened to pull her under.

  She’d lost Gage to an accident, but she’d lost Tristan to her own stupidity and selfishness.

  Stella looked around the room, feeling sick to her stomach again. For more than ten years she’d left this room untouched, not as a monument or a memorial, but as a punishment to herself. And even that had grown into self-indulgence.

  Sorrow is as insidious as water; if left to its own methods it will fill in every crack and crevice. Water can break apart rocks and sorrow can break a person. Stella’s sorrow had worked its way into every part of her and had tried to drown her, but it had not yet completely broken her.

  It was too early to be awake, but she didn’t want to sleep anymore. Not in this bed, this room. Stella rubbed her face over and over until she scrubbed the dreams away, but still yawning, she went down the hall to her own room. She sat for a moment on the edge of her bed, contemplating snuggling under her own blankets or getting into a scalding shower. She’d set her alarm the night before, and if she were going back to sleep, it would wake her in an hour. She took her phone off the alarm clock dock to switch the settings, and noticed the text that had come in sometime during the night.

  Of course it would be from Matthew.

  Of course all it would say was HEY.

  Because it would impossible for him to tell her he missed her, right? That he’d been thinking of her late at night, watching his phone for a message from her, disappointed when nothing came? He certainly couldn’t tell her that, could he?

  And it was ludicrous of her to expect it from him, Stella thought as her fingers hovered over the phone’s keyboard, typing out a reply she then swiped to delete. She knew that man inside and out, upside and down, and it only made her the asshole to expect him to change.

  She either loved him the way he was, which was no good for her, or she stopped loving him. But there’s the problem with love—also like water, it works its way into every crack and crevice of a person, and it can break you worse than any sorrow. She couldn’t stop herself from loving him, not just like that with a snap of fingers and an iron will, but she could refuse to let it break her.

  She needed Matthew right now, but reaching for him would only start them both on that same old tumble down the rabbit hole. No Wonderland at the bottom. Only rough and jagged rocks, only dank, dark water. Only frustration. Only grief. Only that sharp and biting love that ate her from the inside out.

  Stella deleted Matthew’s message without answering.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Jeff had insisted Tristan attend counseling, which Stella didn’t entirely oppose. Enforcing the visits to the counselor as a requirement for Tristan living in Jeff’s house, however, she found utterly despicable and yet so typical of her ex-husband that all she could do when she found out was shake her head. Because Tristan had been grounded from his car for coming home too late—a punishment she did approve of, even if Jeff’s other ideas were lame—Stella picked up her son after the session to take him to dinner. She found him sullen, nails bitten to the quick, unable to look at her. When she’d asked him how the session went, the truth came out of him in a choked, desperate voice that made her want to weep in sympathy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know he was making you go. I thought you wanted to.”

  “I don’t.”

  She’d pulled into the parking lot of his favorite burger joint, but now stared ahead, thinking hard. Her relationship with her son had faltered and misstepped, and navigating it was like tiptoeing through a mine field. But she was still his mother. He was still her son. That had to mean something, even among all the mess.

  “I’m sorry, Tristan. For all of this. I know I’ve been a really shit mom.” She took a deep breath. Cleared her throat. “I know you think I wasn’t giving you enough attention because of my relationship with Matthew—”

  His laugh stopped her. “No.”

  She looked at him. “No?”

  “I was glad you had a boyfriend.”

  “You were?” Frowning, she twisted in the front seat toward him.

  Tristan hesitated, then nodded. “Well...I mean, it was sort of gross, but yeah. And I know I gave you a hard time about it, but...I didn’t want you to be alone, Mom. Dad has Cynthia. And then, you know, I met Mandy. I didn’t want you to be alone, especially ’cause I’m going off to college in a couple years. I just didn’t like him because he was an asshole.”

  “Oh.” Stella blinked, then burst into startled laughter. “Oh, God. Tristan, he wasn’t. I mean, he was, he could be, but...”

  “He made you go there all the time. And he ignored you.” At her next startled look, Tristan shrugged. “I could tell. He was a jerk to you.”

  “Sometimes. Yes. He could be.”

  “He made you happy sometimes, though. Didn’t he? So I’m sorry you guys broke up. And you’re not a shit mother.” Tristan’s voice cracked. “You’re kind of the best mom. I mean, even though you get on my case about a lot of stuff, you also leave me alone to make my own decisions and things. You let me be my own person.”

  How had this happened? This boy in front of her, how had she and Jeff managed to make this? When the pair of them had done everything wrong, how had Tristan still turned out so right?

  “You don’t have to go back to counseling if you don’t want to. I don’t care what your dad says. I’ll talk to him about it.”

  Tristan hesitated, then nodded, looking out the window. “It’s not so bad. But maybe you and Dad should come in with me too, sometimes. You don’t have to do it together.”

  “If you want me to... If you need me to do that, I will.”

  He gave her a smile, a small one, but it was enough.

  “Hey, what do you say instead of junkie burgers, I take you home and we can have lasagna? I made a pan last week. I can defrost some. We can rent a movie too.” Stella took a brave breath; this was more anxiety-making than asking a new guy out on a date. She braced herself for rejection, but instead Tristan smiled wider.

  “Can we rent The Resurrected? It’s supposed to be bad-ass.”

  “Zombies,” Stella said. “Ugh. But okay.”

  Dinner was consumed—it was hard to believe that she’d forgotten how much he could eat, but she had. The movie turned out to be excellent. It was getting to be time to take him back to Jeff’s, something she was not looking forward to at all and Tristan didn’t seem to be either.

  “Can I just stay here tonight?”

  She kept herself from grinning, not wanting to make this a big deal. “Sure. Of course. Anytime.”

  Following him upstairs a few minutes later, Stella paused in the hallway to stare past Tristan’s open door to the one that was closed. She knocked on his doorframe. “Hey. So, listen... Tomorrow I have som