“Why do you say that?”

“You’re brushing my hair. You don’t even know me, and you’re in my house brushing my hair, cooking me dinner. You were a drummer and now you’re a surgeon. You hardly ever blink,” I finished.

His eyes looked so sad by the time I finished that I regretted saying it. He ran the brush through my hair one last time before setting it on the vanity.

“Are you hungry?”

I wasn’t, but I nodded. I stood and let him lead me out of my room.

I glanced once more at my nightstand before I followed him to the food.

People lie. They use you and they lie, all the while feeding you bullshit about being loyal and never leaving you. No one can make that promise, because life is all about seasons, and seasons change. I hate change. You can’t rely on it, you can only rely on the fact that it will happen. But before it does, and before you learn, you feel good about their stupid, bullshit promises. You choose to believe them, because you need to. You go through a warm summer where everything is beautiful and there are no clouds—just warmth, warmth, warmth. You believe in a person’s permanence because humans have a tendency to stick to you when life is good. I call them honey summers. I’ve had enough honey summers in life to know that people leave you when winter comes. When life frosts you over and you’re shivering and layering on as much protection as you can just to survive. You don’t even notice it at first. The cold makes you too numb to see clearly. Then all of a sudden you look up and the snow is starting to melt, and you realize you spent the winter alone. That makes me mad as hell. Mad enough to leave people before they left me. That’s what I did with Nick. That’s what I tried to do with Isaac. Except he wouldn’t leave. He stayed all winter.

Chapter Twenty-One

The seasons split at the seams: spring, summer, fall and winter. I’ve always pictured them as giant sacks filled with air and color and smell. When it’s time for one season to be over, the next seasons splits open and pours over the world, drowning its tired and waning predecessor with its strength.

Winter was over. Spring split and burst forth, spilling warm air and bright pink trees all over Washington. The sky was blue, and Isaac was trimming back the bushes in front of my house. A branch caught my arm the week before as I was walking to my front door and made me bleed. Isaac thought I cut myself. I could see the way he examined it. When he deemed my wound to be too curvy to come from a knife’s blade, he went searching for shears in my garage. Normally I hired a landscaping company to do the yard work, but here was my doctor, hacking away at my little spruce trees.

I watched him through the window, flinching every time his arms flexed and the shears took a new branch in their mouth. If he accidentally hacked off a finger I’d be responsible. There were leaves and branches littered around his tennis shoes. I was never really hot enough in Washington to be dripping with sweat, but Isaac was damp and exhausted. You couldn’t tell Isaac not to do something. He didn’t listen. But, winter was over and I was tired of being his project. He was like a fixture here. On my couch, in my kitchen, trimming my hedges. The air was warm and the change had come. Nick used to tell me I was a daughter of winter—that the grey streak in my hair proved it. He said when the seasons changed, I changed. For the first time I think he was right.

“When are you going home?” I asked when he came inside. He was washing his hands at the kitchen sink.

“In a few minutes.”

“No, I mean for good. When are you going home and staying home?”

He dried his hands, took his time doing it.

“Are you ready for me to?”

That made me so angry. He always answered my questions with a question. Infuriating. I wasn’t a child. I could take care of myself.

“I never asked you to be here in the first place.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You didn’t.”

“Well, it’s time for you to leave.”

“Is it?”

He walked straight at me. I braced myself, but at the very last second he veered to the left and breezed right past where I was standing. I closed my eyes as the air that he stirred wrapped around me. I had the strangest thought. The strangest. You’re never going to smell him again.

I was not a smell person. It was my least favorite sense. I didn’t light candles, or wander into a bakery, drawn in by the scent of the bread. Smell was just another sense that I wrestled into my white room. I didn’t use it, I didn’t care about it. I lived in a white room. I lived in a white room. I lived in a white room. But … I was going to miss Isaac’s smell. Isaac was smell. That was his sense. He smelled like spices and the hospital. I could smell his skin, too. He just had to be a few feet away from me and I could catch the smell of his skin.

“Isaac.” My voice was full of conviction, but when he turned to face me, hands in pockets, I didn’t know what to say. We stared at each other. It was awful. It was painful.

“Senna, what do you want?”

I wanted my white room. I wanted to never have smelled him or heard the words to his music.

“I don’t know.”

He took a step backwards, toward the door. I wanted to step toward him. I wanted to.

“Senna…”

He took another step back, like he wanted me to stop him. He’s giving me a chance, I thought. Three more and he would be out the door. I felt the pull. It was in the hollows behind my kneecaps, something tugging me to him. I wanted to reach down and still it. Another step. Another.

His eyes were pleading with me. It was no use. I was too far gone.

“Goodbye, Isaac.”

I took it as a loss. I thought so anyway. It had been a long time since I had mourned a person—twenty years, to be exact. But I mourned Isaac Asterholder in my own way. I didn’t cry; I was too dry to cry. Every day I touched the spot where Nick’s book used to sit on my nightstand. Dust was starting to fill the space. Nick was something to me. We shared a life. Isaac and I had shared nothing. Or maybe that wasn’t true. We shared my tragedies. People leave—that’s what I was used to—but Isaac showed up. I sat in my white room for days trying to clear myself of all the color I was suddenly feeling: red bikes, lyrics with thorns, the smell of herbs. I sat on the floor with my dress pulled over my knees and my head curled into my lap. The white room couldn’t cure me. Color stained everything.