“What?”

“Nothing. I just realized how much I’ve ruined your life.”

She stared at me, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Well, if your grandmother hadn’t given it up for all those years, because of me, she would have most likely been able to dispense with all the Touches left in the book way before now. And didn’t you say that once the book is done, your family curse is over? You wouldn’t have had to …”

Her eyes widened. “Oh.”

She started walking another few steps, and all the while I let it sink in. Whatever attraction we felt for each other, it was dangerous. All this time, I was thinking that my attraction to her was endangering me. But first I left her to a lifetime of slavery under the Book of Touch. And then I went ahead and stopped her from performing the Touch she needed to perform in order to stay alive. Not to mention that we were going to die together. Even if we vowed to stay away from her Jeep, something else would probably get us. We were bad for each other. Bad. Sure, it felt good being with her, but that was the problem. In my life, bad always accompanied the good. Always.

Suddenly she grabbed my hand and said, “Let’s go,” pulling me in the opposite direction.

Her pace quickened, and I had to pick it up to follow. At first I thought maybe she saw it, too. The writing on the wall in capital letters that we were going to be the death of each other and needed to separate as quickly as possible. When we got to the boardwalk, I caught her looking over her shoulder. I followed her gaze to two forms in the gazebo. Two men, it looked like, standing on the wooden seats and smoking cigarettes. They were staring at us.

Maybe it was just because of the chill in the air, but the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. “Who are they?” I asked.

They were standing in our way. To get by on the boardwalk we would have had to walk right past them. And from the way Taryn stood there, frozen, it was like she was facing a rabid dog. The men stubbed out their smokes and started walking our way. The only thing I could tell was that they were wearing all black, and in movies the bad guys always wear black from head to toe. She tugged on my sleeve. “Let’s go another way.”

I was not really in the mood to get my ass whipped in front of her, so I followed her. “Who are they?” I repeated.

“No one,” she replied, hustling down the ramp on Third Avenue.

I looked over my shoulder. They were coming closer. “More weak people with an unexplained attraction to you?”

She rolled her eyes. “Bryce is an old … family friend.”

“Bryce?” I swallowed and looked back. It was dark, but the taller guy looked vaguely familiar, from photos I had seen at the Reese home, and from the cemetery. I hadn’t been able to get that picture of him, standing over Emma’s grave, out of my mind. He wasn’t much bigger than I was, but grief did things to people, which was how he’d been able to knock me down at the cemetery. He hated me. And he had every right to. I picked up the pace until I was walking in front of Taryn. “He’s a family friend?”

“He lives next door to my grandmother.” She mumbled, “He’s Emma’s brother.”

This was all getting worse and worse by the minute. “I know. I had a little run-in with him at Emma’s funeral.” I pointed to my eye, which was turning yellow in places.

“He did that to you? I thought you said—”

“He wanted to kill me. Because of Emma,” I said. “He knows that I’m responsible.”

“You’re not responsible,” she said. “He’s a weak person, looking for someone to blame.”

“Weak? He sure didn’t feel that way when he was pressing my face into the grass.”

“I bet he’s drunk. I’ve heard he’s spent every night since he got back to town at the Sawmill.”

Even better. Likely he was getting drunk to numb the pain of Emma’s death. Not only had I killed her, I’d created an alcoholic.

The two men slowed down and then disappeared somewhere among the darkness and the dunes. It was worse, not being able to see them. We were in Seaside Park, and nobody was nearby. This could be incredibly bad. I’m putting Taryn in danger, I thought. We shouldn’t be here, together.

She said, “Maybe he’s not following you. Maybe he’s—”

“He told me he wanted me dead.” I grabbed Taryn’s shoulder a little rougher than I meant to. “Let’s go.”

She looked at me, eyes wide with surprise. All I wanted to do was bolt, away from this whole thing. Someplace safe. Home. My bedroom. Somewhere I couldn’t feel anything, because everything always ended up hurting. But Taryn was just standing there, this confused expression on her face, as if she was trying to figure Bryce out. But there was nothing to figure out. Bryce Reese hated me.

“Let’s go,” I muttered, turning. I didn’t want to see her expression. At that point, I didn’t care if she followed. I didn’t care about anything as I hurried down the street, toward home. Everything about me being there, in that moment, was wrong.

Taryn called after me, “Wait up! Wait up! You’re not mad, Nick, are you?”, but I only increased my speed. Finally she let out a small, strangled “Please!”

I had to stop. I turned. Waited for her to catch up. “What?”

She studied my face in the streetlight. “You are mad?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t. I was tired. Tired of trying for things that the universe didn’t want me to have. “I’ll walk you home.”

We walked the rest of the way in silence. I didn’t even stop when we reached her house, and I didn’t say goodbye, just left her alone in her front yard, where she probably stared after me until I was gone from sight. She was like that. Good. Too good for someone like me.

When I left her, I broke into a run. As I raced, breathless, toward home, I thought of my mom, staying in her room day after day, alone. Battering through the salty mist swirling in the streetlights, for a brief, flickering moment, I understood her. Some people have a knack for messing up everything and everyone they touch. Love. Happiness. Walking down the beach, feeling nothing but the wind on my face and the hand of someone I care about in mine. Those things would never be for us. Any momentary thought that they could be ours was just an illusion. That was the house of cards.

I spent the next two days in bed. The You Wills fought to get me out, but I ignored them and thought of the low, dull headache they caused as punishment for my stupidity. When I slept, I dreamt of Emma, floating to the surface of a black sea, but when I was awake, I found myself thinking mostly about Taryn. I tried to convince myself that she was in more danger near me than without me. I wondered if she’d performed the Touch yet. When I wasn’t thinking about Taryn, I felt guilty and disgusted with myself for the large portion of time I had spent thinking about her. I should have been thinking and caring about other things, things I could do something about. Nan with her broken arm. My last year of high school. Not turning into a recluse like my mother. Despite all that, the thing center stage in my brain was Taryn. I didn’t want to care about her. But I did. Too much. And I hated it.

Strangely, even though I vowed to myself I would never talk to her again, that I would run in the other direction if I ever saw her, the visions of us in her Jeep didn’t change. It was useless to tell myself it was over, because I didn’t mean it. After all, school was coming up. I wouldn’t be able to avoid her there.

And then it was the first day of school. I realized that it was also Taryn’s birthday. She was seventeen. I had what I thought was a vision of buying her a cake and singing happy birthday to her on the beach, but then I realized it was just my imagination. We were not together. We could never be together.