“You’ll get hypothermia if you sit outside drinking all night,” I said.

“Wouldn’t be a bad way to go.”

He went for another swig and I grabbed the flask, tucking it into my blanket. “You’re cut off, buddy.”

Max sank onto the rocker bench, defeated.

He was a Jekyll-and-Hyde drunk: one side charming and gregarious, one morose and maudlin. Tonight was the latter. Red-rimmed eyes, lit with a crazed grief. Moisture beading on his skin. I pictured a tipsy Poseidon, kelp strung in his beard, armored in conch and coral, a whalebone trident dangling from one fist. My fingers twitched. I could see the sketch in my head.

He was going to get confessional. That’s what he was here for. Catharsis. Day to day he was like me, walled up, but when we drank together we let ourselves say the things we couldn’t normally say.

I miss her.

I miss him.

It’s our fault.

The cold made my bad hand cramp. I hunched over, and Max said, “How’s it feel?”

“Awful.”

“I envy you.”

“If you felt like this, you wouldn’t.”

“You could get rid of it, if you wanted. Be free.” He gave what might have been a smile. “My wound’s on the inside. There’s only one way to stop that kind of hurt.”

I shivered again, not from the cold.

Max wore a flannel shirt, no coat. Without asking, I slid toward him and tossed the blanket around his shoulders. We didn’t touch, staring straight ahead into the mist, but after a while our heat merged beneath the cover.

“What kept you up tonight?” I said.

“Baseball.” Breath left his mouth like smoke. “Training started today. I watched the kids do warmups.”

His son, Ryan, had been a ball player. All-star, scouted by colleges. Apple of his dad’s eye.

It was good to remind myself of that. Of the person who’d been killed instead of me.

“I used to coach,” Max said. “Today I sat in the stands and watched. And I started thinking, I don’t belong here. I’m not a parent anymore. Just some fucked-up middle-aged man, watching young boys play.”

I shifted uneasily, the rocker swinging. “You’ll always be a dad. Like you’ll always be somebody’s son.”

“I’m nobody’s anything. My parents are dead, my son is dead. I have no ties to this world.”

You have me, I thought, but didn’t dare say it.

“What kept you awake?” he said.

Ryan. Ellis. You.

“The pain.”

“Your arm?”

“My life.”

He laughed hoarsely, understanding.

We rocked in silence awhile. Eventually he slumped and dozed off. I watched him as the sun came up and bruised his skin in reverse: plum, then lilac, then salmon. Now my hand ached to draw, to capture the bronze grit on his jaw, the damp hair curling over his forehead. Neptune, Sleeping, I titled him.

The urge to make art is a hurting. An ache, like desire. Like loneliness.

Except I couldn’t draw anymore. The hand that once spoke for me was dead, mute. It couldn’t even make a fist without pain stropping my spine like a razor, straight to the brain stem.

I slipped out of the blanket. As I stood, Max clasped my bad hand.

“Careful. That hurts.”

“I want to feel it. I want to feel the way you feel, Vada.”

“No, you don’t. Physical pain isn’t better than emotional. It all sucks.” I tugged. “Let go.”

I could have gotten free. No other man touched me like this without getting my fist in his face. But Max was different.

I’d taken his son away. So it was only fair to let him take little pieces of me in return.

I let him clutch harder, and harder, refusing to cry out, until I sat back down and he hugged me, desperate. We held each other in an awkward embrace.

He didn’t speak, but I understood. Perfectly.

I waited for her every morning. Walked down to the wharf at dawn and sat shrouded in fog, watching runners pound past on the cobblestones, silhouettes against the white sun. Their breath trailed behind, the air from a hundred lungs twisting into knots, clinging, dissolving. I waited for the fireball streaking across the gray harbor.

Ellis Morgan Carraway, my former best friend.

Max wasn’t the only ghost haunting the living.

When I caught the flash of red I ducked behind a car, camera raised. I was broke as shit but my one indulgence was a pricey point-and-shoot and I snapped photos as she flew past. I could never quite capture her face. Just her hands rising and hovering with each stride, as if reaching for someone else.

I let the camera swing from the wrist strap, my hand rising in response.

Gone.

Ex–best friend. Ex-soulmate. Ex-everything.

If I were still seeing my psychiatrist he’d say the same thing Mamá did:

You’re codependent, Vada. Build a life without her.

Anyone who calls you “codependent” has never had a best friend. Best friendship is a healthy codependence.

I followed her at a distance and she slowed, planted her hands on her knees. She wasn’t really winded. I knew her too well. She glanced around, bangs hanging in her eyes. Nobody near. Only my breath gave me away, but morning mist rolled in over the docks, cloaking everything in pale smoke.

She took off again, determined.

Straight for the water.

I chased, passing the chain-link fence where friends and lovers had hung hundreds of locks to symbolize their devotion. We had a lock there. A brass lion’s head. We’d latched it tight and tossed the key into the Atlantic. “Love you forever,” she said, and I said, “Forever isn’t long enough.”

Let me correct myself:

Friendship is a healthy codependence if you’re still actually friends.

Elle jogged past the piers, toward the old train yard, where rust-eaten boxcars lay on broken tracks. Rime coated everything like cellophane, crinkling beneath my shoes. I weaved behind beached boats, her shadow.

Where was she going? There was nothing out here but an abandoned bridge that led nowhere.

Ellis veered off the footpath onto the seawall.

It was a shambles of piled rock, a ten-foot drop onto knife-edged limestone and deep ocean. This early, no one would hear her cry if she fell.

My heart heaved. It was like she knew I was there. Like I had to follow, or I might lose her forever.

Stalkers are excellent at rationalizing their behavior.

I’d been athletic once, Elle’s running partner, but since the accident I’d let myself go. Drank myself to sleep, filled my waking breaths with weed. I struggled to keep up while her shoes skimmed slick rock without slipping. Elle ran right on the edge of oblivion, never glancing down. If she fell, the best I could do was call 911. I couldn’t even swim.

What kind of idiot moves to coastal Maine when she can’t swim?

Vada Bergen, who never thinks ahead. Who lives by impulse.

Elle’s foot skidded on ice.

I almost yelled, but some wiser instinct clamped my mouth shut. I paused in the lee of a schooner, watching.

She tossed her arms wide for balance, caught herself on nothing but air. Stood there staring at the ocean, her breath frothing into the cold. I was maybe fifty feet away. I could have called her name. I could have stepped out and said, “Stop punishing yourself. Let’s forget it all and start over. Again.”

Instead I watched her shake it off and lope toward the city, passing me without a glance.

This is what they don’t tell you about losing someone: It doesn’t happen once. It happens every day, every moment they’re missing from. You lose them a hundred times between waking and sleep, and even sleep is no respite, because you lose them in your dreams, too.

When she was gone I went down to the water and sat on the seawall, my legs dangling. I felt the pull of it, that promised erasure, the annihilating blot of the abyss. It’s strange living near the ocean. Living near this edge of eternity, this falloff into nothingness.