We decide to go camping because Daniel says he wants quiet, and because neither of us wants to spend Valentine’s Day pressed elbow-to-elbow with strangers pretending to enjoy a menu filled with food we don’t even like.

  The drive is nothing special in the way good things often are. He keeps the heater too high, I crack the window and insist I’m fine, and we argue about it lazily until he puts on music and sings along, badly, because he knows it makes me laugh. When we pull into the parking lot, it’s nearly empty, the trees standing tall and dark beyond the edge of the pavement.

  “See?” he says. “Perfect.”

  We shoulder our packs and head down the trail, boots crunching over frozen dirt. Daniel walks ahead of me, stopping every so often to point something out—a knot in the bark of a tree that looks like a face, a bird call he claims to recognize.

  “So… Nathan,” he says, glancing back at me, “be honest.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Are you disappointed we’re not doing something more normal?”

  “Like a dinner?”

  “Like a dinner.”

  I take a moment to think about it. “I mean… I do like going out for dinner,” I say. “but restaurants are an absolute chaos around Valentine’s day… and I know how much you hate the noise of happy couples.”

  “That’s true,” he says. “I do hate joy.”

  I snort, and he grins, slowing to a stop in the middle of the trail.

  Before I can say anything, he steps back toward me, close enough that I can smell the scent of pine that has settled into his jacket. He cups my face with fingers that are chilled from the walk, the touch a little bracing and entirely familiar, and then he kisses me. For one wonderful second, the woods fall away entirely, and there’s just the press of his thumb at my jaw, the cold giving way to warmth, the small, ridiculous happiness of being here with him on this day.

  Then he steps back and keeps walking.

  Backwards.

  “Daniel—”

  He nearly trips over a root, arms flailing in a way that makes my stomach drop before my brain has time to catch up, and I lunge forward on instinct, laughing even as I reach for him. He stumbles, regains his balance at the last second, and stands there for a beat with his arms wide.

  “Wow,” I say, still laughing. “Very smooth.”

  “I wanted it to be romantic,” he says, breathless, one hand now braced on his knee. “I did not account for the terrain.”

  “We’re in the woods, big stupid,” I say, grinning at him. “Did you expect the ground to be smooth?”

  He lets out a short laugh and shakes his head, looking down at his feet like they personally betrayed him. When he turns back around, he reaches for my hand out of habit, then catches himself and lets it drop, concentrating instead on where he’s putting his feet.

  The clearing opens up in front of us, the trees thinning just enough to make space, and Daniel stops, scanning the ground. “Okay,” he says, already unshouldering his pack. “We’ll put the tent up first. Before it gets any darker.”

  I watch him kneel and start sorting through poles and fabric, and feel that small warmth spread through me again—the sense that this is exactly where I’m meant to be, cold ground and all, doing ordinary things beside someone who makes me feel like I’m his whole world.

  Eventually, the tent stands, slightly crooked but it would do for the night. We sit back on our heels to admire it.

  “Beautiful,” I say.

  “Just like you.”

  I snort and bump my shoulder into his. “Oh, Mister Romance over here.”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t love it,” he says, grinning, already reaching for the stakes to make a few small, unnecessary adjustments. He presses one down with his boot, then another, fussing over the corners like the tent might feel neglected otherwise.

  We eat sandwiches we made at home because neither of us wanted to deal with real cooking. Daniel hands me mine without asking which one I want, and I feel that quiet, specific gratitude of being known. We talk about work, about a show we abandoned halfway through, about whether we should get another plant or whether that’s tempting fate.

  “Next year,” he says, sipping from the thermos, “we do something easier.”

  “Like what?”

  “A hotel.”

  “Where’s the adventure in that?”

  He nudges my knee with his. “I like not waking up with pine leafs in my mouth.” He smiles at me in that unguarded way that still catches me off-balance, even now. He reaches for my hand without looking, his thumb pressing into my palm. Content, I lean into him, resting my head against his shoulder, and the world narrows to warmth and breath and the low crackle of the fire.

  The woods around us are quiet but not empty, the soft sounds of animals rustling in the bushes and birds settling in their nests. It feels alive in a way that doesn’t bother me.

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  We decide to take a short walk before turning in because Daniel says it will help him sleep. I grab the flashlight, and we head down the trail, the beam cutting a narrow path through the dark.

  We’re talking about out plans this summer when we see him.

  At first, my brain refuses to cooperate. It offers alternatives. A deer. Another camper moving their sleeping bag perhaps. A trick of shadow and movement. But the shape resolves slowly into something that doesn’t belong to any of those explanations.

  He’s hauling something heavy. The flashlight catches on pale fabric, then stops on a hand that is too pale and too slack to belong to anyone living. My stomach drops so suddenly it feels like I’ve missed a step. The flashlight wobbles as my grip tightens, the beam jerking back up, back down, unwilling to look and unable not to.

  Daniel stops walking beside me. I feel it without even having to see it, the sudden tension in his body, the way his breath catches.

  The man looks up.

  He doesn’t freeze. He doesn’t swear or jerk or drop what he’s holding. He just lifts his head and looks at us as if we’ve simply called his name instead of catching him in the middle of something he shouldn’t be doing.

  The flashlight beam catches his face fully then, and my attention snags hard on the right side of it. There’s a scar there, pale and uneven, running from his temple down over his eye and into his cheek, the skin pulled tightly along its path. It looks old.

  I can’t stop looking at it.

  The man shifts his weight slightly, enough that the fabric drags across the ground with a soft, wrong sound.

  His eyes move between Daniel and me, and then, as if he’s reached a conclusion, one of his hands leaves the body and moves behind his back.

  For half a second my mind refuses to supply meaning. Then the flashlight catches a dull, unmistakable shape as his coat pulls aside.

  The sound that follows has no right to exist in this place, on this day at this time.

  A sharp crack that splits the night right open, muffled only slightly by the trees but still unmistakable, a sound that punches through the quiet like a fist through glass. Daniel’s head jerks backwards violently, as though someone has yanked him back by an invisible string. His body follows in a loose, collapsing slump, knees buckling first, then hips, then shoulders folding inward until he hits the frozen ground hard enough that I hear the dull thud of his weight against the earth.

  I drop the flashlight. The beam spins wildly across the dirt, illuminating him in fragments—the side of his face, the dark liquid spreading in the snow beneath him—before it rolls to a stop pointing uselessly at nothing.

  I am already beside him, knees sinking into the cold ground, hands reaching before I can think not to. His eyes are open, staring past me at the canopy above, pupils blown wide in shock. There is a neat, blackened entry wound just above his left eyebrow but the exit is something else entirely.

  The back of his skull is simply gone… a ragged crater where bone and scalp have been blown outward in a wet, explosive fan of red. Brain matter glistens in the flashlight’s beam, pale pink and white flecked with blood, fragments of it clinging to the matted hair at the nape of his neck and scattered across the pine needles. Blood pools beneath him in a dark, spreading halo. It steams faintly in the February cold. A chunk of skull, still attached by a flap of scalp, hangs loosely to one side, exposing the glistening hollow inside where his thoughts used to live—where he used to remember every stupid inside joke we had, where he used to plan quiet weekends like this one, where he used to think of me first thing when he woke up.

  His mouth is slack, lips parted as though he meant to say something, but no sound comes. Only the wet rattle of air moving through his throat, a sound so small and wrong it makes my stomach turn inside out.

  “Daniel,” I whisper. My voice cracks while saying his name. “Daniel—hey. Hey, come on.”

  I touch his face because I have to, because this can’t be right, this can’t be happening. But his skin is already cooling, slack beneath my fingers. I press my palm to his cheek, willing warmth back into it, but there is nothing left to will. His chest does not rise. His eyes do not blink. There is only the stillness, the obscene absence where Daniel used to be, and the awful smell of blood mixing with the cold night air.

  “Please,” I say, the word tearing out of me. “Please don’t—don’t—we were just—we were just talking about the beach. You promised me sand in the bed and bad sunburns and you laughing at me when I complain. You can’t—you can’t die.”

  My thumb strokes his cheekbone the way I’ve done a thousand times. His skin feels wrong under my fingers. No answering lean into my touch.

  “I love you,” I tell him, his blood is soaking into my knees and his brains are on the ground between us. I press my forehead to his, careful not to disturb what’s left, careful not to make it worse even though it can’t get worse. His hair is wet against my skin. Warm at first, before it starts to cool. I close my eyes and breathe him in. The pine, the smoke from the fire, the blood, something faintly sweet underneath, the shampoo he used that always made me bury my face in his neck.

  Behind me the man shifts his weight. “I don’t normally use a gun,” he says, he steps closer as he speaks. I try to look up. I try to stand. I try to shift, to put even an inch of space between us, but my knees stay planted in the frozen ground, my hands still uselessly on Daniel’s body. It feels like gravity has doubled, like the earth itself has decided I belong here, kneeling beside him. “But there was simply no way I would be able to overpower you both.” He lowers the gun as he finishes the sentence. The distance between us is gone now.

  “Look at me,” he murmurs and when my eyes don’t obey fast enough, his bare hand comes up to my face, fingers spreading along my jaw and cheek.

  Pain spreads across my face, as if something inside me has decided I no longer need the outer layers, like my body is peeling itself away in a desperate attempt to escape his touch. It’s overwhelming, a consuming force that feels like it’s erasing me one thin layer at a time, leaving nothing between the pain and whatever he has planned for me.

  I gasp, the sound tearing out of me as his hand forces my head back, forcing me to look at him, holding me still while my skin tries to retreat from itself.

  Fear floods my mind, wild and disorganizing, and something old and stupid and desperate surges up through it. I don’t think. I can’t think. I just react, dragging my nails across the side of his face as hard as I can, feeling them catch and scrape, feeling skin give beneath them while my own burns itself away under his palm.

  He stills, and for one brief, idiotic moment, hope flares.

  His grip shifts, fingers tangling in the collar of my jacket, and before my mind can catch up he slams me sideways. My shoulder hits the tree first, bark scraping through fabric, and then he slams my head back against the trunk, once, twice, he seems to know exactly how much force it takes to make the world come apart.

  Pain explodes behind my eyes, white and total. The sound that leaves me doesn’t feel like it belongs to my body at all. The forest tilts, the ground rushing up too fast, and I have the fleeting, absurd thought that Daniel is going to be angry that I wasn’t watching where I was going.

  He holds me there for just a fraction longer, my forehead pressed to the rough bark.

  I try to pull in a breath and fail. My lungs flutter uselessly, forgetting the rhythm they’ve followed my entire life.

  The ground tilts, or maybe it’s me, and the tree feels suddenly very far away, like something I’m remembering rather than touching.

  There’s a strange calm that follows, heavy and quiet, settling in my chest. The pain dulls, not gone exactly but distant, as if it belongs to someone else now. I focus on the last clear thing I can hold onto: the way Daniel laughed when he almost fell, the warmth of his thumb against my palm, the certainty that I had been exactly where I was meant to be.

  Then even that begins to thin.

  My body slackens without my permission, weight pulling me down and away from the tree, away from the place I was trying so hard to stay.

  The last thing I register is the cold earth rushing up to meet me.

  And then there is nothing left to register at all.