“It’s my fault, Max.” Her voice is softer than I’ve ever heard it and filled with more pain than she exposed through the entire month after David’s death.

My eyes snap to her face, and I watch as her eyes rove around the room, landing on everything around where I’m sitting, but never on me. Everything in me wants to scream, “what?” and find out exactly what she’s referring to. Her eyes slowly fill with tears, and she swallows, looking almost pained by the simple act.

“What’s your fault?” I gently coax.

“She’s so upset with me. She doesn’t understand. I can’t mourn. I tried to make her see, I tried to explain it to her, but I didn’t know how to.” Muriel stops and stares at her fingernails, rubbing each of her nails with her thumbs.

“I don’t understand,” I say, shaking my head.

“Ace loves you, but she already thought she’d lost you, or at least thought she was going to lose you. I …” She stops again and glances up to my face and then back to her hands with a look of shame.

My chest heaves with heavy breaths from the anticipation stirring inside of me. My eyes are stretched wide, waiting to hear more as I work to piece her random admission together. I rub my hands over my head a few times, trying to keep my mind reeled in from where it wants to dive down into my depths of hoping she isn’t really running from me. That this all is just some giant, screwed-up misunderstanding.

“I told her she would understand why I need Steven once you moved on,” she finishes in a whisper.

“I wasn’t … what! I wasn’t going anywhere!” I cry incredulously as I stand up from my chair. My arms bend over my head as my fists clench in frustration. “I just needed to sort things out!”

“I didn’t think you guys would survive. Ace was always running from you, and you followed her. I thought at one point that you’d follow her to the ends of the earth. But after your last big fight, when you never came, I heard her talking to David. She was upset, telling him how she’d attempted to reach out to you, and how you wouldn’t allow her. I think she realized at that time how much effort you had applied. I think the fact that not only were you not coming after her, but were pushing her away, spoke volumes to her.”

I shake my head angrily. I think she thinks I’m telling her to stop talking, because she does and looks a little caught off guard.

“He knew. He knew that I couldn’t stop. Even if I had wanted to hate her, I couldn’t. Please tell me he told her that.”

Muriel’s eyes focus on me for a moment and then look back at her lap as her head shakes ever so slightly. “I don’t know what he said to her, Max. He started speaking to her in French, and although David had tried teaching me French several times over the years, I never picked it up.”

We both sit in silence as I angrily stew over the fact that the only person Ace would ever fully reveal her hand to is now dead and can’t tell us or help her.

“I tried to make things right.” Her voice goes higher, turning into a plea. “When she told me she was leaving, I explained to her that you love her … I tried.”

“You had just told her that I was going to move on!”

She sniffles and wipes a tear from her eye, one that looks nothing like the tears I’ve seen her shed in the past. This one has her eyes turning a bright, angry red and her hands shaking. “I know,” she whispers.

“I’ll go,” I resolve.

Muriel shakes her head. “She’s made herself very clear. She wants time and space. I don’t even know where she lives. She won’t talk to me.” The small holes in her act begin to grow as her face contorts in pain. “I don’t know where my baby is.” Her hands cover her face as ragged breaths fall from her.

The last thing I want to do is comfort the person that has caused my world to cease to exist as I know it, but I do. I walk to her side and sit a little further back on the cushion next to her, and pull her against me. I watch Muriel Bosse mourn for the loss of her child, and I’m pretty sure the fact that her own world has ceased to exist as well.

The next day when I face Kendall for the first time since I threw the glass and demanded that she leave, I learn that no one knows where Ace has gone. I propose that we devise a plan to find her, certain with all of us we can figure it out. Caulder has police connections, Kendall and Mindi can badger anyone into eventually giving up information, Kyle’s already prepared to fly over there and start going door to door. Landon and Jameson join in our efforts, along with my mom. Adam also tries to offer assistance, noting that he has multiple friends in the Northeast and could reach out to the different universities in the region. I don’t know if his interest to help begins with the same goal as the rest of us, but he seems genuine with the intent of finding her. We all want to find her. We all need to find her.

“Delaware is one of the smallest states, someone has to know her!” Kendall quips as she surfs through another unsuccessful internet search, looking for anything tied to her. We’ve been searching for weeks now.

“We should just go,” Kyle repeats, cracking his neck to relieve tension as Mindi stands to check on the two older girls while Sawyer swings beside their kitchen table we’re gathered around.

“Maybe we just need to respect her wishes right now. The more we question her, the more she pulls away.” Savannah slides back from the table, folding her arms across her chest.

“What are you saying?” Kendall’s eyes flare, filled with a fire that looks ready to break free.

Savannah shakes her head. Her eyes focus on the chandelier hanging over us. “I’m done. I’m not looking for her anymore. It’s been six weeks that we’ve been doing this. When she wants to be found she’ll come to us.”

“You’re giving up on her?” Kendall shrieks. “Do you think she’d give up on you? You know she wouldn’t. She’d never give up on us.”

“Kendall she isn’t Ace right now!”

Kendall’s eyes glaze with tears and her chin trembles, but she purses her lips, fighting the sadness with the fire I’d seen. Jameson intercepts her, pulling her to his chest as she thrashes and shakes her head.

“She’s right,” Mindi says, returning to the room. She takes a deep breath as she walks to the front of the table. “Ace knows we’re trying to find her, and she’s made it very clear that at this time she doesn’t want us to. I think we should give her some time, see what she does. If she starts pulling away more, then we’ll try again—”

“What?” Kyle’s eyes narrow and his forehead creases in a look that doesn’t even attempt to hide his anger.

“No more,” she replies quietly.

Kyle shakes his head a few times before gathering Sawyer and leaving the room. All I can do is continue to stare at the hallway where he disappeared. I can’t hear the conversations stirring around me or the movements. I don’t know how to move forward.

“Max …” I feel my jaw clench as Abby’s voice breaks my slumber of blankness. She’s been the most persistent about seeing me. While I was at my mom’s for the summer, she came over nearly every week, though generally my foul mood didn’t have her ever staying long. Jesse accompanied her occasionally, but he was doing summer classes, as well as a new job because he refused to take any money from Abby’s family.

I know what Abby sees this morning; last night I’d been working to drown my memories with gin—a liquor I had chosen simply because I knew Ace hated it.

I’d begun throwing shit away, things that reminded me of her, which only led to an onslaught of memories that I’d worked ferociously to tame by drinking directly from the bottle.