When I woke up, Danny was still lying across me, fast asleep. I knew I’d never get him off of me without waking him up, so I just lay there quietly and waited. His breathing was even and quiet, his cheeks still flushed from crying, his hair stringy with sweat. But if someone had photographed him now, even as sweaty and tear-streaked as he was, he’d still have looked gorgeous.

Carefully, I brushed a few strands of hair from his forehead, and after a while, he opened his eyes. With uncharacteristic lethargy, he used me to pull himself up and looked at me. “Ducky,” he said, giving me a kiss on the lips. It tasted like salt. “You looked after me. Thank you.”

I raised a skeptical eyebrow and glanced around the trashed room. “I failed completely,” I replied. “I’ll make us some coffee, and then I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“I think you broke your wrist.”

“Oh!” Danny raised his swollen hand to eye level and peered at it in surprise, trying in vain to move it. “So I did. How did that happen?”

The coffee got us at least halfway going. We headed out, leaving the debris the way it was. Neither of us had bothered to shower or change. I don’t think I even combed my hair.

We waited at the hospital for nearly three hours. Danny, with his head on my shoulder and my hand in his uninjured one, did nothing but breathe and wait for a nurse to come get us. At last, they X-rayed his injured wrist and put a cast on it, assuring us it was a simple fracture that would heal quickly.

We were silent on the drive home, as well. Danny was still holding my right hand and refused to let go, so I had to shift gears with my left, which was terribly complicated.

“What should we do with her room?” he asked as we neared his place. “I don’t want it to remain completely untouched the way mine is at my parents’ house, but I don’t want to keep it artificially alive like Liam’s. Does that sound dumb?”

“No, not at all. Let’s sleep on it for a couple days, and we’ll think of something. Something that isn’t either of those options.”

“Move out with me, Jessica. I don’t want to stay in that apartment without her.” His voice cracked. “Move out with me. I don’t care where. You pick. Apartment or house, rent or buy, doesn’t matter at all. If you like it, I like it.”

“I’d love to move in with you somewhere.” I wanted that so badly. Danny knew I dreamed of having a little house in the countryside. A nice green backyard, two dogs, children…

Which you two can never have together!

Shut up, I snapped at the voice inside my head. Nobody asked your opinion.

Why couldn’t I silence that obnoxious voice inside me once and for all?

Do you really want to buy a house with him and then live in it alone as a widow?

Great. Now I was starting to argue with myself.

Yes, goddammit. I do. Maybe things will turn out completely different! With love, everything is possible. Never say never!

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said. “Apartment or house? Rent or buy?”

“House. Buy,” I said. “I want it to be forever.”

“Okay.”

It was so macabre. Christina was dead, and we were making plans for the future. But we needed that to convince ourselves that life hadn’t ended for us as well. Tears rolled down my cheeks again, and Danny squeezed my hand tighter. “Let’s wait until the summer,” I suggested. “As soon as my contract ends, we can fly out to America, visit your home. For as long as you want. When we come back, we’ll buy a house. I’ll be earning good money then, so I can contribute.”

“You don’t need to contribute.”

“But I want to,” I insisted.

“We’ll talk about that as soon as I’m in any condition to form reasonable arguments. Everything else sounds good to me.” He let go of my hand and placed his hand on my thigh. The cast covering half his arm left only his fingers free. “Do you really think it’ll stop hurting someday?” Danny looked deeply into my eyes—a sad imitation of that hypnotic gaze he’d once had.

“I’m sure of it. Time heals all wounds.”

“But every wound leaves a scar.”

It was certainly conceivable that Danny’s wounds would never heal. How could they? At age ten, he’d been wrenched out of the life he knew, only to be raped and abused. He’d had to watch his own dog get killed. His own father had beaten him and manipulated him for years, and finally he’d landed in an orphanage at fifteen. Now his father was in prison, his beloved aunt lived in America, and his mother was crazy, not to mention completely uninterested in him. When he was almost seventeen, completely alone in the world, he’d been told over the phone that he had a fatal illness. His parents had even tried to blame him for his mother’s miscarriage.

Thousands of miles from his home, traumatized and frightened, he’d lost his best friend, his anchor. He’d never be able to cope with that. It wasn’t so much that Danny needed Christina—it was that she needed him. That fact had driven him, motivated him to deal with the injustices of the world somehow. If he couldn’t save his own life, he hoped he could at least save the life of someone he identified with. Someone he loved.

And, in his eyes, he’d failed.

He needed to find a new purpose in life somehow, so that he wouldn’t completely spiral out of control. And that was why we were making plans for the future.

I hoped and prayed he would be able to make peace with having lost Christina one day…and I wondered how much pain one person could withstand before it completely destroyed him.

Danny’s pain would have been more than enough to destroy ten people living ten different lives.

 

Jörg was already waiting in Danny’s apartment when we returned. He was horrified at the state of the living room. “Why didn’t you call?”

I shrugged. “It all happened too fast.”

After shooing Danny into the shower, Jörg began cleaning up the broken glass and furniture. I joined Danny in the bathroom so that I could change clothes and get ready for the appointment with the psychologist at the children’s home.

“Great. We’re already going to a shrink together,” he grumbled as we got dressed. I was silent—I couldn’t think of anything to say.

The doorbell rang. It was the police. Why couldn’t they leave us in peace?

“I’ll give you five minutes,” Jörg sternly told the two officers in the hall. “Then that’s enough for today. We have an appointment with a psychologist to get to.” He guided the men into the dining room, and we all sat down amid the rubble.

With Jörg still cleaning up around them, the officers spent nearly half an hour asking the same questions over and over: Who did Christina hang out with? Was there anyone who didn’t like her? Could we describe her dealer?

Danny answered all of their questions obligingly.

But I couldn’t help wondering… How much more of this would he be able to take? They were sticking a knife in his open wounds and twisting it.

Worst of all, their suspicions had been confirmed: Christina had been raped. The police were investigating, looking for the man who’d given her the contaminated heroin. They had ruled out willful intent—junkies were often killed by toxic reactions, they said, and they also didn’t know whether the man had used any of it himself. It was possible he had but his body had been able to handle it.

Eventually, Jörg asked the cops to leave. They promised to be in touch as soon as they knew more.

 

The next day, Jörg brought us back to the psychologist at the children’s home. We went in one after the other to get everything off our chests.

That evening, we started piling the destroyed furniture in front of the front gate so that we could have it hauled away. Danny and I hardly spoke a word. Before, no matter what he was doing, he’d have had some witty remark at the ready, but now he was silent almost all the time.

He ordered new furniture from a catalog and had the delivery guys put it together. He didn’t feel like doing it himself. Actually, he didn’t feel like doing anything at all. The perennially optimistic and cheerful Danny, the guy who was always raring to go and full of crazy ideas, now sat in the living room in front of the television while other people put together his furniture. It didn’t make sense.

This change was almost more than I could take. I wanted my boyfriend back. I felt like shaking him until he snapped out of it. But I couldn’t even manage to get him out of the apartment. He just sat on the couch and waited. I knew he was waiting for the police to find out who had raped Christina and given her those drugs. I wanted the perpetrator to be caught, too, but I prayed to God that the police locked him up right away so that Danny couldn’t get his hands on the guy. Secretly, of course, I’d have loved to see the guy torn to shreds, but I was terrified that Danny might end up in prison. Like his father.

The funeral was scheduled for a Wednesday at the beginning of April. It was a longer delay than usual, because the autopsy report needed to be finished first.

“I’m not going,” Danny told me when we heard the date.

“What are you talking about? Of course you’re going.”

“Nope. Tina and I had an agreement. I didn’t want her coming to my funeral under any circumstances, and she promised not to. She would have wanted the same. It wouldn’t be right of me to go.”

He was silent for a long time, lost in thought, as he so often was these days. “I don’t like funerals,” he went on. “They don’t help anyone. Standing around at a cross to cry is stupid. I don’t want you to go to mine, either.” He gazed at me, trying to hypnotize me as he’d once done, but quickly gave up.

“Then I’ll go alone,” I told him.

He nodded. “You do that. If her old man is there, call me, and I swear to God I’ll come out there and kill him.”

I left the room so he wouldn’t see me crying. What had happened to Danny? Would he stay this bitter and hateful forever?

We spent almost every evening in front of the TV, watching movies we could barely follow. Danny hadn’t run or been to the gym in days, and he hadn’t been to work, either. We sat there stuffing ourselves with fast food, holding hands in silence, looking out the window, and waiting until we fell asleep sometime in the middle of the night. If we got up at all, it wasn’t until noon. Sometimes, we spent the entire day in bed. We didn’t even bother getting dressed.

I dreaded Sunday evening, because I knew I’d have to go home. There’d be trouble at home, but that wasn’t the reason. I was worried Danny would let himself go completely if I left him alone. Jörg was still coming by every day to bring us to the psychologist, but what would Danny do the whole rest of the day?