Rain began to drum on the windows of my room. It had been an exceptionally dry fall, and as winter wrapped around the castle, I was expecting more storms. But it seemed eerily quiet. Like nature held its breath in anticipation, just like us. The cards were about to be revealed, people were going to get hurt, and the thunderclouds let the rain loose.

Vaughn kissed his way from my lips to my jaw and down to my neck, sucking one of my nipples into his mouth. My legs wrapped around his waist in a vise.

“Fuck, you’re beautiful,” he moaned into my nipple, flicking it with his tongue. “Funny,” he murmured against my flesh as his lips moved back up, while he kicked his trousers down. “Talented as fuck.” His mouth dipped into the hollow place between my neck and shoulder, tasting me. “And mine,” he finished, thrusting into me in one go, so deep and carnal, I arched my back and let out a yelp. “A million times over, forever mine.”

He moved inside me in smooth, continuous thrusts that left me clawing at his back with impending insanity. Everything about what we did felt delicious and final and completely different from our previous encounters. This was not Vaughn taking his anger out on me or the time we lost our V-cards together. This was Vaughn apologizing for the past decade, and for what was still to come.

And it was me accepting that I couldn’t keep him.

I couldn’t ask him not to do what he was about to do. I just needed closure before he left. Because he was leaving. All this time, I thought he’d stolen the internship to spite me. Turns out, he had a much bigger plan. I was just a bystander.

A casualty. Collateral damage.

After he came inside me and rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling, I found his hand under the duvet and squeezed.

“Why do you always do that?” he croaked. “Stare at the ceiling. What’s so interesting about it? I always wanted to ask.”

It warmed my heart that he cared. That he wondered. I smiled sadly. “That’s where I keep all my memories of her. They’re written in all the ceilings, of all the places all over the world.” I pointed at my blank ceiling. “At night, I pluck a memory out, relish it, play it like a video, then put it back. I never run out.”

“You,” he whispered, kissing my cheek, “are so effortlessly yourself.”

That was the greatest compliment someone could give me. I turned to face him in bed. “I know what you’re about to do. I just need to hear your story.”

He swallowed.

“The minute it’s done, I’m leaving. I can’t let you waste your life with someone like me. You deserve more, and if trouble ever finds me, it sure as fuck isn’t going to touch you.”

Some things you just need to power through. Losing each other before we’d even had the chance to have one another seemed to be one of them. I didn’t fight him.

“Tell me,” I whispered. “I want to know why you’re leaving.”

He did.

The first time it happened, I was eight.

I’d always had the tendency to disappear. I never stood still, forever on the go.

Mom called me Houdini because I used to vanish from her sight everywhere we went—parks, malls, country clubs, restaurants, SeaWorld, Disneyland. She’d clutch my palm, nearly crushing my bones to dust, muttering about how the things we loved the most were often so slippery and hard to keep safe.

She called me her little explorer, said I’d turn her hair gray, but I was worth it. The world felt like a swollen piñata full of shit I wanted to touch and smear and eat.

That day, though, I should’ve stuck to my parents’ side.

We were at an exhibition in Paris. The gallery had a fancy, five-word name I couldn’t remember, let alone pronounce. There were a handful of children in the gallery, all of them glued to severe-looking au pairs with dark circles around their eyes. There had been a public auction for some rad-ass art pieces collectors and curators had been frothing at the mouth for. Problem was, it was stuck smack in the middle of summer vacation. My mother had been very keen on coming back home with something new for her gallery, so she’d dragged Dad and me along.

We’d go with her to hell, if need be, sans sunscreen.

Back then, I had a nanny whose job was to keep me alive and within reach. I hardly spent any time with Maggie, and when I did, it was for the odd hour here and there, when Mom needed to do something—like participate in this auction. Maggie, a fifty-five-year-old grandma who resembled Lady Tremaine of Cinderella, took me to the downstairs restaurant at the gallery and bought me a healthy pastry that tasted like wood and a carton of organic, sugar-and-taste-free chocolate milk.