Chapter 5
Cole
It had been a year, and I could still feel the ache in my chest when I looked in the mirror and saw my familiar face. If I pressed my hand to the glass, I could almost pretend that Caiden was still here.
My reflection, my twin. All the best parts of me.
I didn’t have the light blue of his eyes, or the soft curls in his hair, but he was there.
He looked back at me every time I looked at myself, and every time I couldn’t help but feel that the universe had picked the wrong twin.
Caiden should have lived—he was so much more than me. So much sweeter, full of so much life.
Kind. Loving. Talented.
And I…
I wrenched my eyes from the mirror angrily, the pain in my chest too much to see looking back at me.
I was nothing compared to him. He was going to be a teacher. He was going to make a difference.
I was just some guy who worked on cars. I had none of his kindness, none of the light that had seemed to live just beneath his skin.
I’d lost all of it the day I walked into his hospital room and saw that man standing over him.
The man.
I still didn’t know who he was—the hospital insisted I’d just imagined him, that security footage hadn’t picked up anyone coming in or out of the room.
I didn’t care.
I’d seen him. He was standing there by Caiden’s bed, and the expression on his face when he looked at me—broken and confused and almost horrified—told me everything I needed to know.
He’d done something.
He’d done something to my brother, and then he’d… disappeared.
It didn’t matter that it was impossible. It didn’t matter that there was no proof he’d ever been there at all.
I knew.
I was sure I saw him sometimes when he thought I wasn’t paying attention—from the corner of my eye while I was working, watching me from a distance when I was out to eat.
And sometimes I saw him in my dreams.
His golden eyes were like the sun burning bright against my skin. He held a red petal in his hand, and I wanted to hate him…
I wanted a lot of things, but it didn’t seem to matter.
As much as I wanted, Caiden had died—I’d known he was going to, but I’d thought I had more time.
Some part of me had still clung to the hope that he’d get better if we just tried hard enough.
He’d gotten sick when we were teenagers, and even though I’d done everything I could—donated blood and marrow, been there, offered to give him more. I would have given him everything.
It wasn’t enough for him to make it past twenty-four, though. We were perfect mirrors of one another, and I couldn’t understand why he’d gotten sick and I was fine. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t give enough of myself to fix him.
Physically, I was fine.
Inside, though, it felt like I was in a thousand pieces that had never come back together from the second I’d dropped that vase on the hospital floor.
I was scattered petals flying through the air.
I’d left myself there when they’d forced me out of the room so they could take care of his body.
I hadn’t felt whole since that man had disappeared.
His body.
Caiden was never supposed to be a body—he was supposed to be here, beside me.
He could have told me the man I’d seen standing over him, the one I saw in my dreams, was all in my head…
and maybe I’d have believed him. He could have laughed at me, because when we were kids, I’d described a man who looked exactly like that as the one I’d fall in love with someday.
I’d drawn shitty little pictures of him in the margins of my notebooks.
My brother would have told me I was full of shit when I said all I wanted was for the asshole to leave me alone. But Caiden wasn’t here, and every time I saw the man, I wondered if it was a manifestation of my guilt because I hadn’t gotten to tell my best friend goodbye.
“Fuck,” I murmured, blinking away the sting behind my lids. Whoever said grief got easier with time was full of shit. Nothing about this was any easier than it had been the day he left.
If anything, it was worse.
If anything, it felt like the days had stretched into centuries and not just a year. Things felt wrong.
And it was worse, because everything else had kept turning like nothing had changed. I still had to go to my job.
I still had to exist in a world that demanded I function—that I eat, sleep, work, make money, pay bills.
It was hard to do when there were parts of me that felt like I didn’t even want to breathe.
I forced air into my lungs in defiance of the grief trying to strangle me and grabbed my keys. As hard as it was, today was another day—just another day. Another day of pretending.
Another day aching.
Another day feeling like there was a piece of me missing. The soft sigh that escaped me was the only sound of resignation I let out. After all, there wasn’t actually anything I could do about it. I just had to… wait.
Wait and know that someday either everyone would be right and time would heal all wounds, or I would finally get to join Caiden.
And that would fill the hollow sensation in my chest, right?
There were parts of me that worried it wouldn’t, parts of me that were so certain something inside me was broken beyond repair.
I had to put those parts aside when I went out into the world—I wasn’t about to have my coworkers ask if I was okay.
Again.
I took one more deep breath, slipping on the mask I wore whenever I stepped outside of my apartment, and moved into another day.
At least the feel of the cool air seeping against my skin through my motorcycle jacket was soothing.
I’d been restless again last night, torn somewhere between nightmares and feeling guilty when they subsided.
It wasn’t feeling peace that made me ashamed, it was knowing where that peace came from—the nightmares stopped whenever the man appeared at the edge of my vision, hazy and soft and hardly there.
It left me drained the next day, exhausted in a way that was bone deep—soul deep. I just wanted…
I wasn’t sure what I wanted anymore, other than for all of this to stop.
I tried to keep my attention on the road when I got on my motorcycle, taking the same route I did every day to the garage where I worked. Once upon a time, I’d dreamed of being something more, but that was so far removed from who I was now. That Cole was a man I didn’t know.
Someone I couldn’t remember.
My eyes drifted to the river running beside me, the water spitting out little bursts of white in a telltale sign that the current was going strong from the rain we’d had the night before.
I could remember when Caiden and I were little, we’d come down to play by the water.
There’d been fields of red and blue flowers before they’d torn everything down to make room for more roads.
That was before we knew he was sick.
Before things were hard.
Before they’d all fallen apart.
I glanced down at the shoreline, and I was pretty sure I could see a little patch of red. My favorite was still there, but there were no blue flowers now. Nothing left of Caiden.
Instead, there was a shadow.
A shadow shaped like a man with a flicker of gold for eyes.
“What the fuck?” I muttered, and his body tensed like he could hear me across the distance, over the roaring water.
Impossible.
He wasn’t supposed to be real, but…
I was too lost in thought, too caught up in the pain that seemed intent on strangling me today to realize what was happening until it was too late.
The car veering toward me was unavoidable, and turning my motorcycle to a sharp left only sent me careening over the edge of the bridge.
My body was moving, flying, and then the hard impact of water knocked the air from my lungs, and the cold sensation of it sucking me under was almost…
Bliss.
Maybe this was okay.
Maybe this was what was supposed to happen.
I could see Caiden now, at least.
Except, when I opened my eyes… I didn’t see Caiden. I saw a golden glow, like the sun. My body was engulfed in red petals and black shadows that spoke in a soft rumbling voice and whispered for me to please stay.