Chapter 37 Forgive Me
FORGIVE ME
NATE
Everything looks different at night, like the whole world’s holding its breath and waiting for me to finally break. My legs drag through gravel and dirt, one heavy step after another, like the ground itself is trying to pull me under and keep me there.
Every sound feels too loud—the crunch of dirt under my boots, the rasp of my breath scraping at my throat, my heartbeat stuttering like it’s not convinced it wants to keep going.
I don’t remember driving here.
Don’t remember getting out of the car.
The past few days are this smeared mess of lights and noise and people touching me, shaking me, pulling me back into a world I didn’t want to stay in.
The warehouse.
The music that rattled the walls and my bones, the bass syncing up with my pulse until everything felt like it was going to blow apart.
The pills weren’t enough anymore, so I reached for something heavier.
Something I swore I’d never touch again.
Heroin.
But the second it hit, the world went quiet in a way that felt holy. My thoughts stopped clawing at the inside of my skull. For the first time since Jake died, I felt like I could breathe without bleeding for it. And then it wore off, and everything flooded back in harder, sharper, meaner.
I should’ve cared when I woke up on Connor’s couch.
Should’ve cared that Nora was passed out beside me, her mascara smeared like she’d cried herself to sleep because she didn’t know what else to do with me.
I waited for guilt or shame or even anger—something human, something that proved I was still a person—but all I felt was static, this hollow buzzing that made it seem like someone scraped out everything inside me and left an empty shell that somehow keeps walking around anyway.
My feet somehow know the way, even when the rest of me doesn’t.
Past the crooked headstones and broken angels, past names that meant something to someone once but don’t mean shit to me. The ground shifts under me, rising and falling like the earth is breathing. Everything smells like wet soil and rot and things that are supposed to stay buried.
And then—there it is.
Fresh dirt.
Black and heavy and wet, the kind that clings to your skin and won’t let go. His headstone is simple, nothing fancy, nothing polished—just his name:
Jacob Adam Sullivan
Beloved Son, Brother, Friend.
I stare at the letters until they blur, until they stop being words and turn into shapes that mean nothing and somehow hurt worse.
There are sunflowers everywhere.
They feel displaced because they’re too bright, too cheerful, too alive for a place like this. Of course Mom picked them—Jake loved them. Said they looked like they were smiling.
Said they turned to chase the sun no matter what. I used to tease him for it but now it just feels cruel.
They shouldn’t look that happy here.
I drop to my knees so hard the shock rattles straight up my spine. Something inside me gives—quiet, but final. A kind of breaking that doesn’t make a sound but still takes you out at the knees.
“Fuck, Jake.” My voice comes out torn to ribbons. “Fuck.”
The dirt gives under my hands, cold and soft. I dig into it until my nails scrape the mud, until it burns. I want it to hurt. I want something to hurt the way losing him does.
“I can’t even remember the last real thing I said to you,” I whisper, barely able to get the words out. “Isn’t that fucked? I can’t remember.”
The silence is thick enough to choke on.
“I should’ve been here. I should’ve…” My throat locks up, refusing to let anything else through. “I should’ve saved you. I should’ve done something. Fuck, anything.”
A tear hits the dirt and it disappears instantly, swallowed up like the ground is hungry for whatever pieces of me I have left.
A laugh slips out of me, but it’s wrong—ugly and sharp.
“It was supposed to be me. Do you hear me? Me. You weren’t supposed to go first. You had everything ahead of you. And I had… fuck, I had nothing.”
The headstone doesn’t care. It just sits there, cold and still and merciless.
“I failed you,” I say, the words splintering in my chest as they come out.
My hands shake as I touch the stone.
“Eighteen years,” I croak. “You got eighteen fucking years.”
The weight of that number crushes something in me.
“You died,” I whisper. “And I’m still here. Why? How does that make sense to anyone?”
The wind picks up like it’s trying to drown me out, but I lean into it.
“That night,” I breathe, eyes burning, “I see it every time I blink. The look on your face right before the gun went off. You weren’t scared. You looked at me like I could fix it. Like I always would.”
The numbness cracks open, and what’s underneath isn’t pain—it’s this vast, empty ache that swallows everything and gives nothing back.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I ask him, knowing I won’t get an answer but begging anyway. “Tell me, Jake. Because I keep filling the space you left with shit that kills me slower, and it still doesn’t touch the hole you blew through me.”
My fingers curl into the dirt like I’m trying to anchor myself to him.
“My whole life was built around you. Protecting you. Protecting Mom. And now you’re gone, and I don’t even know who the fuck I’m supposed to be without you.”
The night doesn’t move, the stars don’t flicker. The world doesn’t give a single shit that I’m falling apart and why should it?
“I keep waiting for you to come home,” I whisper, voice thin and wrecked. “Just walk through the door like none of this happened. Tell me I don’t have to feel this anymore.” My chest caves in on itself. “But you’re not coming back. You’re never coming back.”
I lie down on the grave, cheek pressed to the cold earth. It feels like the only thing real left in my life.
“I don’t know what to do Jake,” I breathe. “I don’t know how to keep going anymore. I’m tired. So fucking tired and I just want it to stop.”
For a long moment, I think about staying right here.
Letting the ground take me too.
Letting everything finally stop.
“You think there’s something after this?” My words slur together. “Somewhere you get to go where it doesn’t hurt all the time?” My throat burns raw. “I hope you’re there and I hope you're happy.”
The pills from earlier are wearing off—whatever the hell it was I took—and my body shakes like it’s being dragged back into a reality I don’t want.
Every heartbeat feels like punishment.
Every memory slams back into me like glass shattering in my head.
“You know what’s fucked?” I laugh again, hollow and soft. “I keep thinking about all the things you’ll never get to do. You’ll never get married. Never get old. You’ll never be older than me.”
No reply.
Just the wind brushing through trees that might as well be mourning with me or mocking me—I can’t tell anymore. My eyes shut, and it’s all right there—the flash, the sound, the way his body collapsed, the way his eyes found mine one last time.
And then nothing.
Just that moment on loop, forever.
“This hurts so fucking much,” I choke out. “I can’t… I can’t keep doing this.”
My body starts shutting down. Heavy limbs, shallow breaths.
“I don’t know how to live with this,” I whisper. “And I don’t know if I even want to.”
The darkness opens like it’s been waiting for me, and this time I don’t fight it.
I let it wrap around me and let it pull me under.
When I wake up, the morning light is this pale, washed-out grey, the kind of color. My whole body is curled around the headstone, like I spent the night trying to keep him warm, like some pathetic part of me thought if I held on tight enough he wouldn’t leave again.
For a split second—one soft, impossible second—I think maybe I crossed over too.
Maybe I slipped into whatever place he went, the two of us finally on the same side of something for once in our lives.
But then the ache hits.
That deep, marrow-level ache.
The kind that proves I’m still here.
Still breathing, still alone, still without him.
And grief crashes back into me like a fucking tidal wave that waited until I opened my eyes to strike.
I curl forward, forehead pressing into the damp soil, and a sound tears out of me—raw and hoarse and almost animal—that I didn’t even know I was capable of.
It feels like everything inside me is being ripped out through my chest, like the whole night was just a rehearsal for this, the real breaking.
I don’t know how long I’m there like that, clinging to his grave like it’s the only thing that might keep me from drowning, when footsteps crunch somewhere behind me.
They’re slow, careful yet still hesitant. Like whoever it is already knows they’re walking in on something they shouldn’t see.
The groundskeepers.
Two older men, faces lined and tired in that way people get when they’ve spent years tending to other people’s grief. They stop a few feet away but don’t speak.
They don’t ask if I’m okay, they just watch.
And something about that—their silence, their patience, the way they stand there like they’ve seen this exact kind of devastation again and again—makes my throat close so tight I can barely swallow.
Because in their eyes, I see the truth I’ve been trying to outrun: I am not the first person brought to my knees by loss and I won’t be the last.
One of them steps forward, gently, like he’s approaching a wounded animal.
He reaches out, stops himself, lets his hand fall.
“Son,” he says softly, voice rough with pity, “you can’t stay here.”
But I don’t move. I don’t even lift my head.
Because what I want to say—what sits burning on my tongue—is then let me stay buried with him.
But all that comes out is a whisper, fragile and helpless: “I don’t know how to leave him.”
The man exhales, slow and sad, and he nods like he understands, like he knows there are graves that take more than a body—they take the living too.
“We’ll give you a minute,” he murmurs.
They step back and wait by the path and as I lie there, cheek pressed to the soil still damp from my tears, it hits me with this sharp, unrelenting clarity: There’s no version of my life where this stops hurting.
No path where I outrun the night he died.
No future where I’m not living with the ghost of who he should’ve become.
The sun climbs higher, lighting the sky in soft golds Jake would’ve made fun of me for noticing, and I feel it warming my back even as the grave beneath me stays cold, stubbornly cold, like the earth refuses to give him up.
I force myself upright eventually. My hand lingers on the headstone, fingertips tracing the letters until they blur and double, and I swallow the kind of pain you choke on instead of survive.
My vision swims and my knees buckle. My whole body trembles like it’s trying to fold itself back into the dirt.
The wind moves through the cemetery, soft and cold, brushing past me.
And the worst part—the part that hollows me out so completely I’m not sure there’s anything left—is knowing that no matter how long I stay, no matter how much I break, no matter how many times I scream his name into the ground he will never answer again.