“That’s a powerful coincidence, finding that third star right then,” I finally said.

Corabelle turned on her side, watching me. “When he said it in class, I could barely breathe. And you sat there, all defiant in your chair, just as stiff and angry as you got at the end.”

I’d been angry. I knew that. The doctors had no more told us Finn would die than everyone was looking to me to make the decisions. To be strong for the whole lot of them, as if this wasn’t as hard for me. Just thinking about that day made the rage boil over and before I could think about what I was saying, I blurted out, “You made me sign the papers to turn off the machines.”

Corabelle sat up. “What are you talking about?”

I should shut this down, but I’d started it. I had to finish it. “The damn forms. The ones allowing them to shut down his ventilator.” Bitterness coursed through me. I hadn’t thought about this in years, but she was making me. She was dredging it all up.

Corabelle tried to touch me, but I jerked away.

“Is that why you left?” she asked. “Because you had to sign?”

I couldn’t breathe, much less answer. Everything was rushing at me, like it had in those final days.

Corabelle dropped her hands in her lap. “We did what the doctors told us to do.”

I couldn’t take this anymore. I sat up and snatched at my bag. “I signed the paper. I decided when it ended. I was the one who told them when to let him die.” I kicked at the fluttering page of the lab assignment and stepped on the stick as I strode away. This wasn’t going to work. Too much history. Too much misery. Too much everything.

I shoved through the door and hauled ass down the stairs. Only when I was on my motorcycle, the roar of the motor drowning out all sound, did I start to feel any better. Distance. I needed miles to separate me and Corabelle again. Nobody could go through all this and come out okay. No one could be tough enough. I sure as hell wasn’t.

The lights of the city began to fade as I tore through Torrey Pines State Park and to the ocean. Just the quiet there, and the lack of strip malls and concrete, calmed my fury. I hated blowing up at Corabelle for something that wasn’t her fault. If she’d signed the papers, nothing would have been any different. The nurse would still have come in, and Corabelle would still have sat in that chair to hold the baby her first and last time. They would still have removed the ventilator. And the whir of the machines and the beeps of the monitors would still have gone silent.

Finn would still have died.

I turned off where the highway made contact with the beach and killed the bike. The water crashed against the shore, its endless wake a lulling sound, like the white-noise monitor some friend had given us for the baby. When Corabelle was still pregnant and couldn’t sleep, I played it for her at night. We laughed that since we couldn’t go to the college by the sea, we’d bring the sea to us.

Everything was flooding back, a trove of memories deeper than the ocean in front of me. I couldn’t handle it any more than I had back then. I’d run again and ditched Corabelle a second time.

I yanked my helmet off and ripped the gloves from my hands. What was I doing? Where was I going? I wanted to hurl something at the moon, all serene in the stars. My classmates were on the building still, doing their lab work, and now I was going to start with an incomplete on the first assignment. Hell, maybe college was a waste. I had experience at Bud’s. If he wouldn’t promote me out of the oil changes and tire repair, I could find a place that would. My family boasted a long line of blue-collar workers. I didn’t have to be any better.

I couldn’t run from the stars, the whole ceiling winking at me like a mockery of my time on the roof with Corabelle. There didn’t seem to be any place where I could escape.

Chapter 11: Corabelle

The sugar jars clanged together as I shoved them all in a bin to be filled. Whoever closed the night before was officially on my bad side. Prepping the coffee stand for the next day was the job of the evening crew.

I opened on Thursday mornings, a crazy early shift that started at 5 a.m. The shop would open in half an hour and Jason and I were manic, grinding beans and starting all the coffees, filling the bagel bin and bringing in the pastries from the dawn delivery.

But the work was brainless, so I could think through all the events of the night before. After Gavin stormed out, I caught the page of his lab work, filled out mine, adjusted for his, and turned them both in. I didn’t really want to help him, and even as I did it, I burned with anger that he let something as small as a signature ruin everything. If he hadn’t left me then, I would have been okay. No blackouts, no arrest, no leaving my old college.

Sugar slid over my hands as I overfilled a jar. “Shit!” I said, pulling back on the jug.

Jason paused as he walked by with a tray of biscotti. “Frozen Latte knows curse words?” He shook his dreadlocks. “The world is upside down.”

I flicked sugar at him. This seemed so unbelievably simple. I’d spent half the night trying to remember that day, the parts I could bear. I really had no recollection of the conversation about the paperwork. We sat in some little conference room, and they’d gone over the results of Finn’s heart test, and his brain scans, and how there was no longer any hope and the surgeon would not operate.

I closed my eyes for a moment. The room was so clear, the gray walls, black chairs, fake wood table. The doctor’s beeper had gone off incessantly, but he ignored it, at least.