“You come here a lot?” I asked eventually, pulling my knees to my chest. As much as I wanted to simply enjoy this interlude, I couldn’t help wondering how we’d both ended up here.
“When I need a break,” he said. “It’s a good place to think.”
“Too much thinking isn’t always a good idea.” Thinking diminished what I’d seen, transforming a man’s death from tragedy to collateral damage.
“You want to talk instead?”
I shrugged. “Won’t change anything.”
“It might change you.” He flipped to a fresh page, too quickly for me to see what he’d drawn. “Show you a different perspective.”
My head felt crowded, as if the images and emotions of the day were about to spill over. I looked at the assortment of headstones and marble angels, and thought about the little girl who’d lost her father for no reason other than the laws of a universe she didn’t know existed. Thought about how quickly my future had slipped away. I was tired. Tired of walking and getting nowhere, tired of choosing and never seeing a change. Tired enough to confide in a boy who wasn’t real and wouldn’t remember me.
“My family . . . ,” I began. “They’re big into making good choices. Big decisions, small ones . . . They believe life is made up of every choice you’ve ever made, one leading into the next, like the notes in a song.”
Simon nodded, his pencil flying over the page, and the misery inside me ebbed.
“But that’s crap. You can lead a perfectly good life. You can make great choices, and in the end, completely random events will undo everything.” I pointed to the tiny headstone. “That’s a baby’s grave. No one chooses that. No one wants that. People die not because of what they did or didn’t do. It’s not their choice. It just . . . happens. Why bother choosing if the world’s going to do what it wants regardless? What’s the point in trying to make a difference?”
He set the sketchpad down. “Because it matters.”
“It doesn’t. I watched someone die today.” His pencil stilled. “There was no reason for it. He didn’t do anything wrong. He couldn’t have chosen differently. It was ‘his time,’ and now he’s dead, and nothing he did mattered.”
“You’re crying again,” Simon said. He leaned over to brush at my cheek, the canvas of his coat sleeve rasping against my skin.
“I couldn’t stop it,” I said softly. “There was nothing I could do.”
He smoothed a lock of my hair. “That’s the worst.”
I nodded and swiped at my nose.
“Del . . .” I looked up, surprised he knew my name. “I come here and sketch almost every day. These trees. These graves. Every day.
“It doesn’t bring them back. But it matters that I come here. That they’re remembered. Even when the outcome is the same, it matters. And it changes me.”
He spoke with such conviction, but I shook my head. Outcomes, not intentions. That’s what the Consort taught. “It’s easier to be philosophical when they’ve been dead for fifty years. The man I saw had a family. A little girl. And now she’s alone.”
His expression hardened. “Would it be better if he’d never existed?”
I thought back to the silent unraveling I’d witnessed. “I don’t know. Maybe? To spare people that kind of pain.”
“You’re wrong.” His fingers tightened on the pencil.
“Del!” Addie’s voice, distant but coming closer. I slid off the wall.
“I should go.” I gave him as much of a smile as I could manage—which wasn’t much, and swiveled away, stubbing my toe against a small headstone. Unlike the other graves, its surface was shiny, the engraving crisp. I looked closer.
AMELIA LANE
BELOVED MOTHER
Below that, her dates. She’d died last winter, a few months shy of forty.
“Amelia Lane,” I breathed, and turned to Simon, who quickly shifted his attention to his sketchbook. “Your . . . ?”
“My mom.” His words felt like a punch to the chest.
“I don’t understand.” Except I did. Echoes needed their Originals to survive, but not the reverse. I stared at the marble slab. Sixth grade. The cancer diagnosis. She’d beaten it then in the Key World, and lost to it here.
“She was sick,” he said, grief etched across his features as sharply as her name in the stone. “For a long time. And then she was gone.”
“I’m sorry.” Such small words for such a huge loss.
“She mattered,” he said. “I couldn’t change it, but I was there. I still am.”
I nodded, feeling frantic. Feeling like an idiot for mourning a stranger when Simon was grieving for his mom.
Some things were constants. His mother’s illness must be one of Simon’s. Cancer wasn’t a choice. From the minute the first cell turned malignant, every Echo that had sprung up carried the disease within her. The only difference between worlds would be how she treated it.
He stared at the headstone. “That family you saw today . . . Do you really think they would have rather never had him? They made him happy, and he did the same for them. That time mattered more than anything.” He met my eyes. “Trust me.”
“I do.” Whatever I’d learned from the Consort crumbled away under the force of his certainty.
I couldn’t help wondering about the real Simon, the one I was supposed to see tomorrow. The one with shadows under his eyes for no reason, and sadness in his voice at odd moments. What if this was his truth, too?
If his mom was sick again, people would know. The whole community had pulled together to help them before; they would do it again. Simon might not confide in me—he’d barely known I existed three weeks ago—but surely he would have told someone. Word would have gotten out.
It struck me that I’d never heard anyone talk about Simon’s father, even during the year his mom had been so sick. “Who do you live with now?” I asked. “Your dad?”
His eyebrows snapped together, face darkening. “I wouldn’t even know where to find him.”
“He doesn’t know?”
“He doesn’t deserve to know. I can take care of myself.”
“I believe you,” I said, noting the hardness in his eyes, the lines of sadness around his mouth. He’d tried to take care of me, too. “Thanks for not trying to cheer me up with a bunch of stupid sayings. Most people would have.”
There. A hint of the same cocky grin I’d seen so many times. “I am not most people.”
“No,” I agreed solemnly. “You’re better.”
It never ceased to amaze me that his Echoes could be so different, and yet the same in essentials: self-assured, perceptive, challenging. And if I was being honest with myself, hot.
My cheeks heated. He’d told me something tragic and private, trying to make me feel less alone, and I responded by wondering what it would be like to kiss him. If there was a hell, I thought, looking out at the tilted, time-worn graves, I was definitely going there.
Addie’s voice rang out again, even closer. She must have been tracking my signature. “I really should go.”
He frowned. “You keep saying that.”
I paused. “Do I?”
“Don’t you?” He shook his head like he was trying to clear it, and tore a page out of the sketchbook. “Here. For perspective.”
It was a rough sketch of me, my back pressed against the bark of the tree, leaves drifting around me. The lines were too strong and sparse for prettiness, but the girl he’d drawn was striking, the kind of girl people noticed.
“I don’t look like that. It’s great—it’s beyond great—but it isn’t me.”
“Perspective,” he said again, with another grin.