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The way Sam sat there and took it, poker-faced and stiff, like she believed she deserved it.

Because she did believe it, didn’t she? That was why the breakdown in the alley. The fear in her eyes when we’d been back in Montana and she’d only been thinking about coming back here.

The anger that surged through me was staggering. White-hot and immediate, flooding my veins like adrenaline before a game, except there was no puck to stop and no net to defend. There was just Sam, somewhere in the back of this coffee shop, pulling herself together in a bathroom because the girl who’d been punishing herself for half a decade still couldn’t let anyone see her break.

I thought my family was dysfunctional, especially with how cold and transactional they were and how they were more concerned with protecting the family name than the family itself. But at least my parents’ neglect was impersonal. It came from indifference, not from looking at their child and seeing a ghost.

Sam’s family had taken their grief and aimed it like a weapon at the one person who was already destroying herself with guilt. And the worst part was that she’d let them. She’d internalized all of her family’s slights against her since Bryce’s death and turned it into proof that she was exactly what she feared—the reason her brother was dead.

I wanted to go find her, to pull her into my arms and tell her that she was the bravest, strongest, most infuriatingly stubborn woman I’d ever known, and that whatever happened five years ago was not her fault. I didn’t need to know all the details to know that was the truth. I knew Sam—maybe not as well as I’d thought, but I knew how loyal she was to her friends, how she’d stepped up for Abby over and over, how she’d upended her own living situation and moved into the hockey house just to make life easier on Abby. She never complained when Drew’s daughter didn’t sleep through the night. She was always putting others first.

Sam’s heart was pure goodness. She’d never hurt someone she loved. I knew that as certainly as I knew my own name.

But I couldn’t do any of that because she hadn’t told me any of this. She’d trusted me enough to bring me here, and I wasn’t going to betray that by revealing what Mira had shared before Sam was ready.

So I sat across from Mira and kept my face perfectly, painfully still.

“Thank you,” I said. “For helping me get a better grasp of the situation.”

Mira studied me across the table with that same searching look she’d given me in the alley, like she wanted to make sure I was truly on Sam’s side. I could guarantee she wouldn’t find someone more devoted to Sam than I was.

“She deserves someone in her corner,” she said. “Someone who isn’t going to run when it gets hard.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

This might be “fake” for Sam, but it had never been for me, not since a certain music festival when she’d first insisted on calling me Harry.

“Good.” She straightened in her chair, and we both turned as Sam came back into view, her eyes a little redder than before but her face composed.

Nothing I’d learned today changed how I felt about her. If anything, it just made me more determined to be exactly what she needed. Because now I understood everything she’d been carrying — and I had no intention of letting her carry it alone anymore.

THIRTEEN

I used to think that if I just kept giving enough of myself to the people I loved, it would eventually make up for what I’d taken.

That had been my playbook for five years—be the ultimate best friend, the first one to show up, the last one to leave, the girl who held everyone else together so they never had to feel the way I did. If I could just be enough for the people still here, maybe it would offset the life I’d stolen from the person who wasn’t.

It never worked. But I kept trying because the alternative was sitting still long enough to feel the weight of everything I was running from.

But sitting across from Mira while she caught me up on the five years I’d missed, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. Because the truth was right there in the warmth of her smile and the easy way she laughed and the fact that she looked at me like I was someone worth being happy to see.

I didn’t deserve it. But God, I soaked it in like sunlight after a long winter.

“—and the repair guy literally told me I’d be better off buying a new one, but you know me.” Mira rolled her eyes and gestured toward the espresso machine behind the counter. “I watched about forty YouTube videos and fixed it myself.”

“Bryce would’ve loved that,” I said with a slight smile before I could stop myself.

The words hung in the air between us. I braced for the flinch, the flash of pain, or worse, the anger that my mom had looked at me with when I’d first mentioned him after the accident.

But Mira just smiled wide. “He absolutely would have. He probably would’ve filmed the whole thing and narrated it like a nature documentary. And here we see the wild barista in her natural habitat, armed with nothing but a wrench and sheer stubbornness.”

We both laughed, and it felt so good, not just to laugh, but to laugh about something Bryce totally would’ve done with someone who’d loved him just as much as I had. Harry’s hand found my knee under the table, warm and steady, and gave it a little squeeze. I didn’t look at him because I knew if I did—if I saw whatever impossibly tender expression was on his face right now—I’d lose it again, and I’d already maxed out my crying-in-public quota for the day.

“He absolutely would’ve done that,” I said. “Complete with the British accent.”

“The terrible British accent,” Mira corrected, both of us laughing again, and it didn’t hurt the way I expected it to. It ached, but it was the kind of ache that reminded me he’d been real. He’d been loved.

He still was.