Ashes to Ashes (Burn for Burn 3)

He can’t.

But I can. Not for me, but for them.

I concentrate as hard as I can, and I hold back the fire for them. The flames hiss away from me as if I were a force field. I wrap myself around the three of them and carry them to the window, the heat on my back.

And then, the warmth and the light, they move through me. They envelop me.

I’m changing again. This time into something new.

And I’m gone.

Chapter Sixty-Eight

LILLIA

WE FALL ONTO THE COOL green grass. I can’t stop coughing, I can’t get air into my lungs. I can hardly even see, my eyes are so watery.

Beside me Kat is doubled over, heaving and spitting black soot into the grass. Her face is streaked with ash and sweat. “Mary!” she screams, hoarse. We stare up at the burning house.

In that moment Mary’s house becomes a fireball. Every inch of it is embers. The house lights up the whole sky like a second sun. I see Reeve in the grass. He’s still moving. I crawl over to him and press on his wrists as hard as I can.

Sirens wail in the distance. Whatever brought Mary back, whatever brought us together, it’s over. Mary is gone. Kat sobs against me, full-body racking sobs, and I hold her tight. I can hear the sirens, getting closer and closer. I feel Reeve’s pulse. He’s alive.

He’s free. We all are.

Because whatever Mary was in the end, she saved us.

Epilogue

LILLIA

WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT CHANGED us forever, Reeve, Kat, and me. None of us would ever be the same again.

In the fall, when everyone else left for college, Kat stayed behind. She reapplied and went to college in the spring. Not to Oberlin. Instead she chose NYU. She said New York would be good for her, a better scene than Ohio. But we both knew the truth.

Reeve needed twenty stitches in each wrist. He was still in bandages for graduation. Everyone at school thought he’d tried to kill himself over me, and he never denied it.

He was pretty scarce that summer. Reeve moved to Connecticut only a few weeks after graduation to do summer sessions. I thought I might hear from him when I started at BC, the way he said he would at prom, but he never called. The following year he played football in Florida, then reinjured his leg his sophomore year, and that was that.

Alex waited until the last minute of summer to decide where he was going to college, but he eventually said yes to USC and went out to California. I cried when he left.

I had a couple of boyfriends throughout college, nothing too serious and nothing close to being in love. Alex and I would e-mail every so often, and he’d always send me something on my birthday. After Nadia graduated from high school, my parents moved back to Boston, but we kept the house on Jar Island. We turned into summer people again.

Kat’s dad died of a heart attack a year after college graduation. We all went back to Jar Island for the funeral. Everyone who cared about Kat was there by her side—Reeve and his family, Alex, me. During the service I thought I saw Mary, sitting in the balcony, and then I blinked, and she was gone. I guess it was a trick of the light.

When Alex and I took the ferry back to Boston together, I asked him if he was seeing anyone special, holding my breath all the while. Alex half smiled in a sardonic sort of way and said, “You’ve ruined me for other girls, Lillia. No one else comes close.”

I let my head fall onto his shoulder. “That was my whole plan.”

We haven’t spent more than a few days apart ever since. Some things are just meant to be, I suppose.

Kat hasn’t set foot on Jar Island since her dad’s funeral. She lives in Brooklyn now, which is probably where she was meant to be all along. Pat moved there too, after selling the house. It went for an insane price; real estate on Jar Island is in such high demand. Now they share a loft space in an old factory. I want to visit Kat, see what her life is like. Maybe Alex and I will go sometime this year.

I still go back to Jar Island for holidays and during the summer. And sometimes I’ll see Reeve driving around in his truck. He and Luke took over his dad’s business.

I remember how he used to look in his football uniform. No boy has ever been as handsome as Reeve in that uniform, on that field. I remember what it felt like to fall in love for the first time. You think you’ll never love like that again. But you do.

Life is long if you let it be.

I only wish Mary had been able to find that out.

I hope she got off Jar Island.

I hope she found her peace.