Riley asked me to keep reading.

Not out loud.

He made that clear almost immediately, his voice quiet and uneven as we sat side by side on the edge of his bed with the brown journal resting between us like something alive. He didn't want to hear the words spoken. He didn't want them given a voice in the room, and I understood that because I didn't want to hear them either. Some things felt less real when they stayed trapped on paper. Some things became unbearable the second they entered the air.

"Just read it," he said softly.

I looked at him. "Riley..."

"Please."

His eyes were fixed on the journal, but his hands were clasped tightly together in his lap, his knuckles pale. He looked afraid of the book and afraid of himself, and the sight of it made something inside me ache so sharply that I had to look away.

"You don't have to do this right now," I whispered.

"I think I do."

"No, you don't."

"I do," he said again, but there was no anger in his voice. Only fear. "I don't want to look at it anymore. I don't want to read the rest of it. I don't want to hear it. But I need to know if there's something in there I should know."

I swallowed.

He looked at me then, and the fear in his eyes softened into something else. Trust, maybe. Or the beginning of it.

"If I have to trust anyone," he said, "based on everything I wrote down and everything on that wall..." His gaze flicked briefly toward the photographs, toward all those frozen versions of us, then came back to me. "It would be you."

My throat closed.

I didn't want to read it.

Every part of me wanted to close the journal, hand it back to him, walk downstairs, and pretend we had never found it. I wanted to go back to the version of the day where Riley had smiled at the smell of pumpkin spice and vanilla. I wanted to go back to the moment he asked me to teach him photography. I wanted to stay there, in the almost-hopeful part, where the pain was still familiar enough to survive.

But Riley was looking at me like he needed someone to be brave because he couldn't be.

So I nodded.

"Okay," I whispered.

He exhaled shakily and leaned back slightly, turning his face toward the wall of photographs instead of the journal. I opened it again.

At first, the pages were like the others. Little sketches. Pieces of poetry. Thoughts written in small pieces like he had been afraid to give them too much space. A cracked mirror. A boy with a smile stitched across his mouth. A drawing of a house with smoke pouring from the windows but no fire anywhere in sight. The words beneath them were heavy, but not worse than what I had already seen. They were sad and strange and poetic in that quiet Riley way I hadn't known existed.

I read slowly.

Carefully.

I did not read aloud.

The room stayed silent except for the soft turning of pages and Riley's breathing beside me.

Every once in a while, I glanced at him. He didn't look at the journal. He stared at the photographs instead, his eyes moving from picture to picture like he was trying to find proof of the person who had made all of this. Proof that the boy who had written those words had also laughed. Had loved his family. Had teased his sister and made dinosaur pancakes for Milo and taken hundreds of pictures of a girl he claimed was only his best friend.

I kept reading.

Then I reached the last few pages.

And my heart stopped.

At first, I didn't understand what I was looking at. My eyes moved over the words, but my brain refused to gather them into meaning. I read one line. Then another. Then I went back and read the first again because surely I had misunderstood. Surely Riley had meant something else. Surely grief and exhaustion and fear had twisted the words into something worse than they were.

But the longer I stared, the clearer they became.

My mouth went dry.

The room tilted.

I stopped breathing.

No.

The word did not leave my mouth, but it filled my entire body.

No.

My fingers tightened around the journal until the pages bent beneath my grip. Riley shifted beside me, but I couldn't look at him. I couldn't move. I couldn't even blink. I kept reading because some awful part of me needed to know, needed to reach the end, needed the words to change before I got there.

They didn't.

My breath caught in my throat, sharp and broken.

The journal slipped from my hands and hit the floor.

Riley turned immediately. "Autumn?"

I pressed one hand against my chest.

Something was happening inside me.

Something old and familiar and terrifying.

My heart was beating too fast. Too hard. The room had gone too bright and too far away at the same time. I could hear Riley say my name again, but it sounded like it was coming from underwater.

"Autumn?"

I shook my head and tried to stand.

I had to get out of the room.

I had to get away from him before he saw me like this.

Riley didn't remember me like this. He didn't remember the empty hallways, the bathroom floors, the shaking hands, the way I sometimes lost the ability to breathe inside my own body. He didn't remember how to help me, and I could not put that on him. Not now. Not after what I had read. Not when he was standing in the middle of a nightmare he didn't even know belonged to him.

"I'm okay," I tried to say.

It came out wrong.

Thin.

Breathless.

A lie that didn't even make it to the end of itself.

I pushed myself up from the bed, but my legs didn't hold. The room swung sideways, and I dropped to my knees beside the bed, one hand still clutching my chest as I gasped for air that would not come all the way in.

Riley was beside me instantly.

I barely saw him move.

One second he was on the bed, and the next he was kneeling on the floor in front of me, close but not crowding, his face pale with panic. I tried to turn away. I tried to hide my shaking hand against my stomach, but he saw it.

Of course he saw it.

Even without remembering, he saw it.

He reached for me.

His hands closed around mine.

Both of them.

Warm. Careful.

Exact.

My entire body froze.

For one second, I forgot how to panic.

Riley had taken my shaking hand between both of his exactly the way he used to. Not similar. Not close. Exactly. His palms surrounded my fingers, his thumbs pressing lightly against my knuckles, holding me steady without squeezing too hard. It was the shape of a memory his mind had lost but his hands had somehow kept.

I looked up at him.

Tears blurred his face.

"Riley," I gasped.

His eyes were wide and terrified. "What? What happened?"

I grabbed onto his hand suddenly, clutching him tighter than I meant to.

He startled at the force of it. For one awful second, I thought he might pull away, but he didn't. He stayed. His hands tightened around mine, not enough to trap me, just enough to tell me he was there.

"Breathe," he said, but his voice shook. "Autumn, breathe."

The words almost broke me.

Because he didn't know.

He didn't know he had said that before. He didn't know he had spent years helping me borrow his breathing until I found my own. He didn't know that his hands were doing what they had always done. He didn't know that, for one impossible second, he felt like my Riley again.

"What did I write?" he asked.

His voice was laced with fear.

I couldn't answer.

I shook my head, but the movement only made the tears fall faster.

"Autumn." His voice cracked. "What did I write?"

I pressed my lips together because I could not say it.

I could not give him those words.

Not yet.

Not like this.

The journal lay open on the floor beside us, the last pages exposed, Riley's handwriting dark against the cream paper. I could see pieces of it from where I knelt, and every line felt like something sharp pressed beneath my ribs.

The crash wasn't an accident.

The thought came so clearly I almost got sick.

The crash wasn't an accident.

Everyone had called it that. The doctors. The police. Our families. Me. A terrible accident. A horrible, random, unfair thing that had happened to Riley on an ordinary night a few days after he broke my heart.

But it hadn't been random.

He had gone out that night knowing he might not come back.

No.

Thinking he wouldn't.

The room blurred again.

My hand gripped his harder, and this time Riley did wince, but he still didn't let go.

"Autumn, you're scaring me."

I sobbed.

Quietly at first.

Then harder.

I tried to stop it. I tried so hard. Riley didn't remember me enough for me to cry like this in front of him. He didn't know how to hold this. He didn't know how to hold me. But I couldn't stop. The sound tore out of me anyway, broken and small and awful.

Because I had read the last pages.

Notes.

They were notes.

To Willow.

To Kai.

To Lydia.

To Milo.

To me.

I had not read all of them. I couldn't. I saw enough. His mother's name written with an apology beneath it. His father's. Lydia's. Milo's, the handwriting shakier there, like even writing his baby brother's name had hurt too much.

And then mine.

Autumn.

My name.

Not Juliet.

Autumn.

I remembered the way the page had looked. How much space he had given me. How many words there were. Too many and not enough.

I'm sorry I couldn't love you the way you love me.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the words were still there.

I'm sorry you gave me your heart and I didn't know what to do with it.

A sob shook my entire body.

You deserve someone who looks at you and knows immediately.

Riley stared at me, horrified.

I couldn't speak.

I couldn't tell him that the night I confessed to him was not only the night my heart broke, it was the night something inside him had apparently broken too. I couldn't tell him that those four days after were different because now I could see them clearly. The distance. The shorter replies. The way he had not come over. The way he had said he was busy. The way I had told myself he just needed space because I had made things awkward between us.

No wonder he didn't text the way he usually did.

No wonder those four days had felt wrong.

I had thought he was avoiding me because I had loved him.

I had never imagined he was saying goodbye.

Another sob tore out of me, and Riley moved closer without thinking.

"Autumn, please."

His voice broke.

"What did I write?"

I shook my head again.

His eyes darted toward the journal.

Panic shot through me.

"No."

It came out as barely more than a breath, but he heard it.

He looked back at me.

"Don't," I whispered.

"Why?"

"Please don't."

Riley stared at me, and I saw the exact moment fear became understanding. Not full understanding. He couldn't have that yet. But enough to know that whatever was on those pages was worse than he had imagined.

His hands trembled around mine.

"Did I hurt someone?"

The question destroyed me.

"No," I said immediately, though I could barely breathe. "No, Riley."

His face crumpled with confusion and fear. "Then what?"

I couldn't say it.

How was I supposed to tell a boy with no memories that the person he used to be had wanted to disappear?

How was I supposed to hand that back to him?

How was I supposed to look into the eyes of the Riley who had started smiling again, who had asked me to teach him photography, who had remembered the smell of pumpkin spice and vanilla, and tell him that before the accident, before the amnesia, before the hospital room where he woke up and forgot me, he had written goodbye notes?

I couldn't.

Not yet.

So I cried.

I cried with my hand trapped safely between his, and he stayed there on the floor with me even though he didn't understand why. He stayed even though his own fear was written all over his face. He stayed even though he had no memory of all the other times he had done this exact thing.

His thumbs moved over my knuckles.

Slowly. Instinctively.

My breath hitched.

He noticed.

"What?" he whispered.

I looked down at our hands.

"You used to do this."

Riley's eyes dropped.

"With my hand," I said, each word difficult to force through the panic. "When I couldn't breathe."

His hands stilled.

I looked up at him through tears.

"You don't remember," I whispered. "But you knew."

Riley looked at our hands for a long moment.

Then his face changed.

Not recognition. Not memory.

Something deeper and more painful.

"I'm sorry."

I shook my head. "No."

"I'm sorry."

"No, Riley."

"I don't know why I did it."

A broken laugh slipped out of me, full of tears.

"I do."

His eyes lifted to mine.

The room was quiet around us.

Too quiet.

Downstairs, his family had no idea what had just been opened upstairs. Willow was probably reading about pumpkin bread and bad weeks. Kai was probably sitting beside her, looking at the handwriting of a son he had almost lost. Lydia was probably pretending not to cry.

They didn't know.

Not yet.

They didn't know that the first journal held family memories, but the last held goodbye.

Riley looked toward the journal again.

"Autumn."

I knew what he was asking. I also knew he deserved the truth. But not from the floor. Not while I couldn't breathe. Not while he was still holding me like a memory his body remembered better than his mind.

I wiped at my face with my free hand.

"You need to sit down."

His expression went pale. "That bad?"

I closed my eyes.

The tears spilled anyway.

"Riley..."

He swallowed. "Tell me."

I looked at him.

I thought about the note.

The apology.

The way he had written that he was sorry he couldn't love me the way I deserved.

The way he had written my name like a final confession.

The way everything I thought I understood about the accident had suddenly shattered.

I squeezed his hand.

"You wrote goodbye."

The words were barely audible.

Riley stared at me. The color drained from his face. "What?"

I couldn't look away from him. "You wrote goodbye notes."

His breath caught. "To everyone?"

I nodded slowly.

His eyes moved toward the journal.

Then back to me.

Riley's eyes filled with tears. "I don't remember."

"I know."

"I don't remember feeling that."

"I know."

"I don't remember writing it."

"I know."

His breathing changed.

Faster. Shaky.

For one terrible second, I thought he was going to fall apart too, and maybe he would have, but then his hands tightened around mine again like he had to hold onto something or disappear.

"What did I say to you?"

I shook my head.

"Autumn."

"No."

"Please."

I couldn't.

Not all of it. Not yet.

So I gave him the least cruel piece of the cruelest truth.

"You apologized."

His face twisted. "For what?"

I cried harder.

"For not being able to love me back."

The silence after that felt endless.

Riley stared at me.

And then, slowly, his face broke.

Not into memory. Not into understanding.

Into grief for a boy he did not remember being.

"Oh," he whispered.

The same word again. The same terrible word. The word from the parking lot. The word from the morning he learned I had loved him.

Now this.

I closed my eyes, unable to bear it.

Riley's hands were still around mine.

Warm. Shaking.

Real.

"He thought he hurt you," Riley whispered.

I opened my eyes. He wasn't looking at me anymore. He was looking at the floor, at the journal, at the evidence of a life he could not reach.

"He thought he hurt all of you."

I could barely speak. "You were hurting too."

Riley shook his head, but not like he disagreed. Like he couldn't understand how to hold the thought.

"I don't feel like him."

The words cracked open something in me.

He looked at me then, terrified. "What if I am?"

I reached for his other hand with both of mine now, even though I was still shaking. "You are Riley."

His eyes searched mine.

"But that doesn't mean you have to be alone with what he felt."

He stared at me.

"You hear me?"

He nodded once, barely.

"You don't have to be alone with it."

A tear slipped down his cheek.

It was the first time I had seen him cry for himself. Not because someone else was crying. Not because he felt guilty. For himself.

For the boy who had written goodbye notes and driven into the dark thinking he wouldn't come home.

For the boy he couldn't remember being.

For the boy we had all missed while he was standing right in front of us, smiling so none of us would look too closely.

I held his hand.

This time, I held his.

And neither of us moved from the floor.

Not for a long time.