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have—”
    “Yeah, well, happy birthday,” he said.
    The tone in his voice reminded me of when I would go to dinner at some stranger’s house with my parents when I was a kid and my mom forced me to go up to the unknown mystery person and thank them for the invite to a house I never wanted to enter in the first place. It was every child’s worst nightmare—the strained powwow with the unknown adult.
    “I take it you’re still upset,” I said.
    “Still upset? I can’t believe the mess you’ve got yourself into.”
    Even on my birthday he couldn’t miss the chance to tell me yet again about what a mistake he thought I’d made. This summed up our life together over the past several months. If he didn’t like something, I was sure to hear about it. He missed the reality of how it affected me, and I didn’t have the patience for it anymore.
    “I need to jump in the shower,” I said. “I have a lot to do before the party tonight.”
    “I’m trying to talk to you, Sloane. Don’t you care about what I have to say?”
    “If you want to rehash the same topic again, I’ve said everything I want to say on the subject,” I said. “I can’t take back what happened, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I can’t help that.”
    I grabbed a towel out of the hall closet and walked into the bathroom.
    “So what, discussion over because that’s all you have to say?” he said.
    I turned away from him and closed my eyes and just took a moment to relax my accelerated heartbeat.
    “Let me have this one day, Nick—okay?” I said. “Just this one.”
    He shook his head.
    “I’ll see you tonight,” he said, and he yanked open the front door and hurled it shut behind him. A picture that clung to the wall in my foyer of Gabby and me when we were kids plunged to the floor and glass eradicated into tiny fragments.
     

CHAPTER 10
     
    Every year since Gabby died, I always visited her grave on my birthday. I usually went alone, but under the circumstances, flying solo was out of the question. Taye did his best to give me the privacy I needed and kept a comfortable but close distance. The warmth that radiated down from Park City’s summer sun filled every inch of me with peace, and being there with Gabby was one of the only places I could go where I felt that way.
    “I wish you were still here Gabby,” I whispered, when I reached her headstone. “There are so many things I want to tell you about my life. I feel like I’m just going through the motions while the world spins all around me. You don’t know how much I could use your advice right now.”
    Wherever Gabby was, I was sure she had a flabbergasted look on her face. I had always been the strong one of the two of us. I never leaned on anyone for anything. My life’s motto was easily summed up with the familiar words: if it has to be, it has to be me. It’s not that I wanted it that way, it was just the way it had always been.
    I knelt down and placed the wildflowers in my hands in front of the marble stone, and when I stood back up, I caught a glimmer of something under a rock the size of my fist that sat on top of the center of her headstone. I must have been too swept away in the moment when I first arrived to notice it. I lifted the stone from where it rested. Beneath it was a slip of paper, and it was pink. I set the rock aside and stared at the paper like I was in some kind of trance, but before I had the chance to unfold it; Taye Diggs was at my side. He didn’t miss a beat.
    “You want me to open it?” he said.
    I shook my head.
    “I can do it,” I said. And I reached out and unfolded it.
    YOU’RE COLD, SLOANE MONROE
    VERY, VERY COLD
     
    ***
     
    Fifteen minutes later a half a dozen people milled around the gravesite, including Coop. The note and the rock had been preserved in plastic and passed off to the appropriate person, and I doubted I’d ever see it again. I gazed on my sister’s grave and