PROLOGUE

I walked out of the room, shutting the door behind me, muting out all of the beeps and stutters of the machines, the angry red dots of noise that they kept yelling. My life had become these machines and the story that they told. It was a story of sameness.

For a month, she had been the same.

It was time to end the story.

I leaned back against the glass door, waiting for the cold feel of it to seep through my shirt and into my skin. I wanted to ice down, too, to freeze solid and never move again. Then we'd be the same, me and her. The same and still different, like we always were. When I pressed my hands against my eyes, they slipped a bit on the tears, but I was able to rub hard, make the dark hollow of blindness explode with fireworks. It looked like the Fourth of July there, all red and yellow and streaks of blue. I didn't want the light to end; I pressed harder.

A hand touched my shoulder. "Are you ready?" a nurse asked. "Dr. Wilks came—he wants to be the one to do it."

I swallowed hard and crossed my arms over my chest, holding my ribs as hard as I could. "I'm not ready," I gulped, swatting at my eyes. I couldn't stop crying. We had changed places—I was the crybaby now, not her. I was the one who teared up at everything, every little thing that reminded me of her and of us and of this. Even postcards made me cry, empty postcards at the bookstore.

Postcards were things for secrets, you know. We never kept secrets from each other.

I looked at the nurse. Was her name Shelly? Sarah? I couldn't remember. "I need to find my parents, and then I'll do it," I told her, taking in a deep breath.

"They're over in the hallway," Shellysarah said, pointing through the glass doors. There was my mother, my father, the two of them holding hands and talking with their heads bent close. I stared at them—they were growing old together, weren't they. They had been together for over twenty years; I had been born so quickly after they were married. Just ten months later. They were married, they had a family, they were in love.

How come they got the time to do all of that? They were so lucky, for a moment, I hated them. I did. I had to look away, staring at them hurt so badly.

But when I glanced back, I saw them coming towards me, my mother's arms rising up to gather me like I was still just a little boy. I had seven inches on her, maybe seventy pounds, but I felt like she was able to reduce me to the same size I was when I was seven, when I had fallen out of a tree and walloped my arm against the concrete of the road. She had kissed my broken bone and smoothed my hair off of my forehead and told me that everything would turn up just right.

I didn't cry then. I wasn't much of a crier until I met Mary Anne.

The way her palms touched my spine, though, just made me want to sob. This was my mother, this was her trying to make this okay. And she couldn't. No one could. It was impossible, it was all lost.

I turned from her to my father, and his hand reached around my neck and pulled me to him. My father rarely touched me, he didn't put his hands on me in anger or in happiness. Our hands would meet, maybe we would let a forearm slip around to the other's back, but nothing that required closeness, the way that you hold someone in your arms. But he was clutching me tight, his fingers daggers in my shoulder, the flat surface of his palm rubbing into my back like my mother had done. I felt a pressure surrounding me, and I realized that I was nesting in between their bodies.

My parents were trying to protect me. Shelter me.

It was too late, though. It was all too late.

I remembered what we had said to each other the night before, the way that they were holding me too hard, too desperately, like they were afraid I would disappear. Do you do that when you let go of your other half? Do you just evaporate in that instant? Or worse—you hollow out and still have to drag yourself around because there are other reasons to live. I had written those reasons on my right hand so that I wouldn't forget. I had written them on the crooked lines of my palm so that I could hold her hand and lose her but still hold hard to why I couldn't follow.

I couldn't, no—I wouldn't. I could, and maybe I should, but I won't. At least I'm pretty sure that I won't. Almost sure. My parents weren't letting go; they were trying to wring that out of me. Was it that simple? I wasn't sure of anything, and I have spent so many years fixating on what is right. What is right, what I can be sure of, and focusing all that I have into those things.

I know that I am smart. Focus it into school.

I know that I am talented when you put me in a pair of sneakers and hand me a ball. Focus it into basketball.

I know that I love Mary Anne. Focus it into us.

That's all I get. Everything else, I can be wrong, so amazingly wrong it takes my breath away. I am left a gasping, hollowed thing so many times. Look how quickly things change, look how quickly things can fall apart. There are six billion other people on this planet, everyone has their own list of things that make them right and strong and focused. Everyone has needs and wants, and we all crash together and try to find our own place.

Sometimes, your place overlaps with someone else. When they leave, you get more room.

I don't want room. I want her. I need her. But she's been gone for a long time: I have to tell myself that over and over, as if it will make things okay. She is gone, this is what I need to do. She is gone, this is what she would want.

But Mary Anne is a fighter. Mary Anne said, No dying. How can this be what she wants? Why can't her father be the one to decide? Why does it have to be me?

Because I married her. How stupid was that? It's incredible: in less than a month, I'll be able to drink, and I will have already been married and widowed. I'm going to buy the largest bottle of vodka at Liquor Mart and swim all the way to the bottom. I haven't drank since I was sixteen. It was going to be an interesting night.

And she wouldn't be there. When you turn twenty-one, I am so not cleaning up your puke—you tell your stupid guy friends that whatever damage they cause, they are responsible for dealing with it, she had laughed on my birthday last year.

Big talk, little follow-through, I teased, reaching over the cake she had made to tug on one of her dark curls. You're so gonna be there—lecturing me, sure, but you'll be there to help my drunk ass to bed.

She had ducked her head against her chest, trying to scowl, but she folded back into a smile and leaned across the table to kiss me, her face a golden thing in the candlelight. I reached for her, sliding the cake out of the way so that I could climb to her. I always followed her—I couldn't be sure of things, so I stole from her map, the confidence that rode in her skin. Leading me to her, leading me home.

Where would I belong if Mary Anne was gone? The library, the classroom, the court. Who is that guy, though? A guy without a home.

My parents were creating a kind of heat around me, pressing me back into warmth. My mother rested her head between my shoulder blades, those things that look like wings. I had my head on my father's shoulder, and he turned his head so that his mouth was near my ear.

"I love you, you know that, right?" he said, and I nodded into his skin. I did.

"I love you, too," my mother sighed, tucking her arms between me and my father. Her fingers curled over my ribs, that place that could crack and break, those things that are supposed to protect your heart. They had been worthless. My heart was gone, it was a missing thing, it was lying on a bed with Mary Anne, it had fled to wherever it was that she had gone.

"She's with her mother," my own mother told me last night. "She's happy, Logan, I swear. She's with her mother, with her best friend—Barbara? And the British boy from Yale. They're all together, they're all okay, I promise."

"She's not with us, though. She's not with Dawn or her folks or Stacey and her girls or anyone here," I mumbled back. She's not with me. Come back, come back. She was so good at coming back—why hadn't she? Maybe it was a question of could. She would if she could. I hoped. She had chosen us over her mother once before.

Of course, Barbara had been alive then. But there was someone alive now that I couldn't imagine Mary Anne ever leaving—she wouldn't leave what she had fought so hard for, would she?

Dad took a step back and put his hands on the side of my face. "Are you ready?"

"No," I said, and Mom gripped harder on my chest. "But…I just said goodbye. I guess I shouldn't drag this out any more, should I."

"Do you want us to go get her family?" Mom asked, slipping around to stand at my side.

I shook my head. "I said I'd do it, and then go into the waiting room and tell them when she was…gone. Well, more gone than she is."

"That she's died," my father supplied.

"Yeah," I breathed, slumping down on him again. After a moment, I pulled back and gave my body a hard shake. Come on, Logan, game on. Game on. But Mary Anne hated my game face, she hated the way I was when I played. How could I be strong and not be the person that she didn't like? How could I get through this? Without her.

Mom reached up and touched my head, the back of it, the small line in the bone from where I had once cracked my head open. From where I had bled and didn't stop bleeding for months. I knew that feeling—it was back. "Do you want us to go get Kerry and Hunt? Coach?"

"No. Just—you two, can you stay right here?" I asked, pushing my thumbs into my eyes and wiping hard. I realized that my father hadn't made one comment about being strong, about being a man, questioning my character because I was crying so much. This was a weakness he could understand, the softness that we have for the women we love. How they can rip us open like knives. He took my hand and held it like my mother would, rubbing over my knuckles with his thumb and then bearing down tight.

"We'll be right here," he promised.

I looked down at my mother. "Tell me that I'm doing the right thing."

Her hand drifted to my shoulder and held me there. "You are doing the right thing."

"Okay," I nodded, and I took a deep breath and turned around, back into her room. Shellysarah the nurse caught my eye, and I nodded at her, too.

I walked through the door and untied my shoes. I set them in a little row under a chair and padded over to the bed, to the long line of white where she was waiting. But not for me. For something else that I could give her. There were so many tubes running into her body, I could barely make my way to her through the maze of things keeping her alive. The large, ridged tube that moved her lungs full and empty, But her heart—that was all her. That was working without any prodding. It was an illusion, it was, it was the thing I could put my hand on and snap at the doctors, See? She's still here. Here's my proof.

And they would smile in a sad, shadowed way and try to explain to me why I was wrong. But it was my Mary Anne, and I loved her, and that made me right. I brushed off their words like an annoying rain and kept her here with me, measuring myself against that heart. It told me that I was right, that this was right. That she wanted to live, it did, she wanted to live, she did.

I listened to that heart above all things. I always had.

I put my hands on either side of her and pushed my way up onto the bed, lying on her right side. I tucked my head under the snaking lines of her monitors. They'd take all of these off so I could hold her, but not yet. For now, I had to be careful as I put my head against her neck, threaded my arms around her limp body. She was cold; where was the fire inside of her blood, where?

Where did you go, Mary Anne? Why can't I come with you?

Dr. Wilks walked in, that solemn face of his showing nothing and everything at once. "So, you're ready?" he asked.

"No," I sighed, "but it's time, isn't it?"

"It is," Dr. Wilks nodded. The room was filled with nurses, and I looked at him in a panic. I didn't want all of these people here. He waved a hand at me. Wait. "They're just unhooking her—they'll go, don't worry."

Better, better. The nurses worked around me, pulling off all of the small plastic plates on Mary Anne's head and her chest. Machine after machine went silent, their staccatos fading away. Even her heart monitor: it was pointless to measure it when it would be ending so soon.

All that was left in her body was the breathing tube, and all that was left in the room were she and I and her doctor. I could feel the eyes from people in the hallway, but I shut them out as if they were on the other side of the thick black lines that box off a basketball court. Outside of my world, my home. I slid over her, curling halfway over her body. I pulled up the blanket that she loved so much, the same color as my eyes, and tucked it around us. "How long will it take?" I asked, brushing the side of her face with the pads of my fingers.

"A few minutes," Dr. Wilks said. "I'm going to do it now, Logan, okay?"

Not okay. But I didn't say anything, which he took as a yes, leaning over and pressing the blue button on the ventilator tube and letting it fall away with a hiss, the sigh of a snake. He took a few steps back from the bed, leaving just me and her. Me and her and a want.

"I promised, no more talking," I whispered. "But I just wanted to say again, I love you. Okay? Okay," I said, wiping my eyes into her neck. I slipped my head down and rested it on her heart, nesting it on the ridged scars that crossed her chest. I watered her wounds as if my tears would make her grow back to me, rising up from her sleep like a tree. An undying tree, my Mary Anne. I held my ear to her chest and listened to the beating of her heart.

I curled a hand up around her face and pressed deeper against the thin barrier that kept me from that heart, her heart, my heart. I tipped my lips against her skin and then listened, what I loved to do—listen to her. I let everything else fall away into a spread of silence and bore down on that beating.

She was sound now, and I didn't want to miss the last beat.