RHYS’ POV
The empty dark is worse than the angry kind.
Angry I can work with. Angry has edges – walls I can hit, a body I can throw into a drill until the feeling burns off. The empty dark doesn't have edges. It opens up underneath you and you fall into it and there's nothing to grab onto, nothing to fight, just a silence so complete you can't tell if you're drowning or if you drowned hours ago and haven't noticed yet.
Elena's letter cracked open something I sealed shut when I was twelve years old. And now it was flooding. Nine years of concrete and she put a crack in it with two pages of cream paper and the word proud and now everything I'd buried was pouring through and I didn't have enough hands to stop it.
I'd been sitting on my couch for hours. The letter was on the kitchen counte
