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He’ll come back."
    The words linger in the air, the despondency at the core of both Harper and Austin too heavy to let them be buoyed by such an intangible hope.
    “It hurts a little less every day,” Harper admits after a while. “But I don’t feel better being here. I just feel… haunted,” she says wearily as she stands, a hand in the air to signal Dylan over. “I should go,” she tells both of them at the same time, while her hands dig in her purse for her debit card. Austin is faster and while she has her head bent, searching through her belongings, he hands Dylan a twenty. Harper finds her card just as Dylan walks off, and with wide eyes, tells Austin, “You didn’t have to do that.”
    “I know. But you haven’t worked in weeks,” he shrugs.
    “Thank you,” Harper concedes. She gives Austin a smile, and is pleased when she realizes it doesn’t feel forced, and leans over to pull him into a half-hug. The crook of her elbow squeezes his shoulder hard, as he palms her back and digs in his fingers just enough to feel the protrusion of her ribs. He’s always wanted to touch her, but not like this, and his hands feel burnt with guilt and sadness when she pulls away. She smiles still, but it dwindles when she sees the color has drained from his face. She presses her palm to his stubble-covered cheek and he tries desperately not to close his eyes and lean into her touch as she says, “You look terrible.”
    “So do you,” he echoes woefully, pulling her hand away from his cheek. He watches as it drops to her side before he looks back up at her, a wry smile on his mouth. “I feel a little better, though. Seeing you, knowing I’m not the only one suffering… It’s nice to have that in a way. That sounds awful, I know, but it’s true.” Harper nods, understanding and not faulting him, and hugs him again, a crushing appreciation for common sorrow. He can hardly bring himself to let her go this time, let her escape into the night and take with her that feeling of kinship. “We’ll get through this, Harp,” he says, as much to himself as to Harper, as he releases her. “I promise you.”
    Austin watches as Harper goes and the pain in his chest returns, but it’s not the same as before. It’s changed, worsened. He aches for her, as he always has, but the feeling ripping through him is no longer loneliness. It’s a guilty hope, a remorseful yearning. Because for the briefest amount of time, with the ghosting memory of the feel of her skin beneath his, he finds himself thinking, in the wake of this destruction, he might one day have the chance to love her the way she should be loved.

CHAPTER THREE
     
     
    When Harper awakens, it’s early enough that she’s not sure if the absolute blackness of the sky is the dead of night or the dark before the dawn. Sleep comes easier now than it has during the three months prior, but she still finds herself awake at odd hours, eating Cheerios at two in the morning, dead asleep at four o’clock in the afternoon. The glowing numbers of her alarm clock tell her it’s closer to dawn, thirteen minutes shy of six in the morning, and she draws her legs out from beneath her heavy down blanket, slowly deciding to rise to the day. Normally—though her sense of normalcy has become skewed as of late—if Harper were to awaken before her six o ’clock alarm, she would use that extra time to send Liam a good morning text and read the news on her phone in the oversized armchair in the corner, just sit and listen to the patter of rain on the roof tiles or the howl of wind through the branches of the oak tree, the sounds of dawn. She hasn’t set her alarm or had a routine morning since the fifth of September, but today, waking so close to what was once normal for her, she grabs her phone from where it sits on her end table, flicks on her bedside lamp, and curls up in the cream-colored velour chair. She doesn’t even look at the icon for her text messages, doesn’t feel a