I don't remember sitting down. One second I was standing in the closet doorway, staring at the empty space in the box, and the next I was on the floor of my bedroom with the box in my lap, turning it upside down like the journal might have slipped beneath the photographs, the letters, the jewelry, might still be here if I just looked hard enough.
It wasn't.
"Talia." Kairo crouched in front of me, gun still in his hand, forgotten. "Look at me."
"It was right here." My own voice sounded far away. "I put it right here after the funeral. I didn't even open it. I wasn't ready, and I thought there'd be time, and now…"
"We'll find it."
"You don't know that."
"Maybe," he said. "I don't."
That honesty, of all things, was what broke me. Not the theft. Not the open door or the disturbed closet
