"What do you believe, then?" I asked.

"As long as either of us is alive, I will be your mother," she said. "Even if you die, I-"

"When," I said.

She nodded. "Even when you die, I will still be your mom, Hazel. I won't stop being your mom. Have you stopped loving Gus?" I shook my head. "Well, then how could I stop loving you?"

"Okay," I said. My dad was crying now.

"I want you guys to have a life," I said. "I worry that you won't have a life, that you'll sit around here all day with no me to look after and stare at the walls and want to off yourselves."

After a minute, Mom said, "I'm taking some cla.s.ses. Online, through IU. To get my master's in social work. In fact, I wasn't looking at antioxidant recipes; I was writing a paper."

"Seriously?"

"I don't want you to think I'm imagining a world without you. But if I get my MSW, I can counsel families in crisis or lead groups dealing with illness in their families or-"

"Wait, you're going to become a Patrick?"

"Well, not exactly. There are all kinds of social work jobs."

Dad said, "We've both been worried that you'll feel abandoned. It's important for you to know that we will always be here for you, Hazel. Your mom isn't going anywhere."

"No, this is great. This is fantastic!" I was really smiling. "Mom is going to become a Patrick. She'll be a great Patrick! She'll be so much better at it than Patrick is."

"Thank you, Hazel. That means everything to me."

I nodded. I was crying. I couldn't get over how happy I was, crying genuine tears of actual happiness for the first time in maybe forever, imagining my mom as a Patrick. It made me think of Anna's mom. She would've been a good social worker, too.

After a while we turned on the TV and watched ANTM. But I paused it after five seconds because I had all these questions for Mom. "So how close are you to finishing?"

"If I go up to Bloomington for a week this summer, I should be able to finish by December."

"How long have you been keeping this from me, exactly?"

"A year."

"Mom."

"I didn't want to hurt you, Hazel."

Amazing. "So when you're waiting for me outside of MCC or Support Group or whatever, you're always-"

"Yes, working or reading."

"This is so great. If I'm dead, I want you to know I will be sighing at you from heaven every time you ask someone to share their feelings."

My dad laughed. "I'll be right there with ya, kiddo," he a.s.sured me.

Finally, we watched ANTM. Dad tried really hard not to die of boredom, and he kept messing up which girl was which, saying, "We like her?"

"No, no. We revile Anastasia. We like Antonia, the other blonde," Mom explained.

"They're all tall and horrible," Dad responded. "Forgive me for failing to tell the difference." Dad reached across me for Mom's hand.

"Do you think you guys will stay together if I die?" I asked.

"Hazel, what? Sweetie." She fumbled for the remote control and paused the TV again. "What's wrong?"

"Just, do you think you would?"

"Yes, of course. Of course," Dad said. "Your mom and I love each other, and if we lose you, we'll go through it together."

"Swear to G.o.d," I said.

"I swear to G.o.d," he said.

I looked back at Mom. "Swear to G.o.d," she agreed. "Why are you even worrying about this?"

"I just don't want to ruin your life or anything."

Mom leaned forward and pressed her face into my messy puff of hair and kissed me at the very top of my head. I said to Dad, "I don't want you to become like a miserable unemployed alcoholic or whatever."

My mom smiled. "Your father isn't Peter Van Houten, Hazel. You of all people know it is possible to live with pain."

"Yeah, okay," I said. Mom hugged me and I let her even though I didn't really want to be hugged. "Okay, you can unpause it," I said. Anastasia got kicked off. She threw a fit. It was awesome.

I ate a few bites of dinner-bow-tie pasta with pesto-and managed to keep it down.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

I woke up the next morning panicked because I'd dreamed of being alone and boatless in a huge lake. I bolted up, straining against the BiPAP, and felt Mom's arm on me.

"Hi, you okay?"

My heart raced, but I nodded. Mom said, "Kaitlyn's on the phone for you." I pointed at my BiPAP. She helped me get it off and hooked me up to Philip and then finally I took my cell from Mom and said, "Hey, Kaitlyn."

"Just calling to check in," she said. "See how you're doing."

"Yeah, thanks," I said. "I'm doing okay."

"You've just had the worst luck, darling. It's unconscionable."

"I guess," I said. I didn't think much about my luck anymore one way or the other. Honestly, I didn't really want to talk with Kaitlyn about anything, but she kept dragging the conversation along.

"So what was it like?" she asked.

"Having your boyfriend die? Um, it sucks."

"No," she said. "Being in love."

"Oh," I said. "Oh. It was . . . it was nice to spend time with someone so interesting. We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?"

"Alas, I do not. The boys I'm acquainted with are vastly uninteresting."

"He wasn't perfect or anything. He wasn't your fairy-tale Prince Charming or whatever. He tried to be like that sometimes, but I liked him best when that stuff fell away."

"Do you have like a sc.r.a.pbook of pictures and letters he wrote?"

"I have some pictures, but he never really wrote me letters. Except, well there are some missing pages from his notebook that might have been something for me, but I guess he threw them away or they got lost or something."

"Maybe he mailed them to you," she said.

"Nah, they'd've gotten here."

"Then maybe they weren't written for you," she said. "Maybe . . . I mean, not to depress you or anything, but maybe he wrote them for someone else and mailed them-"

"VAN HOUTEN!" I shouted.

"Are you okay? Was that a cough?"

"Kaitlyn, I love you. You are a genius. I have to go."

I hung up, rolled over, reached for my laptop, turned it on, and emailed lidewij.vliegenthart.

Lidewij, I believe Augustus Waters sent a few pages from a notebook to Peter Van Houten shortly before he (Augustus) died. It is very important to me that someone reads these pages. I want to read them, of course, but maybe they weren't written for me. Regardless, they must be read. They must be. Can you help?

Your friend, Hazel Grace Lancaster She responded late that afternoon.

Dear Hazel, I did not know that Augustus had died. I am very sad to hear this news. He was such a very charismatic young man. I am so sorry, and so sad.

I have not spoken to Peter since I resigned that day we met. It is very late at night here, but I am going over to his house first thing in the morning to find this letter and force him to read it. Mornings were his best time, usually.

Your friend, Lidewij Vliegenthart p.s. I am bringing my boyfriend in case we have to physically restrain Peter.

I wondered why he'd written Van Houten in those last days instead of me, telling Van Houten that he'd be redeemed if only he gave me my sequel. Maybe the notebook pages had just repeated his request to Van Houten. It made sense, Gus leveraging his terminality to make my dream come true: The sequel was a tiny thing to die for, but it was the biggest thing left at his disposal.

I refreshed my email continually that night, slept for a few hours, and then commenced to refreshing around five in the morning. But nothing arrived. I tried to watch TV to distract myself, but my thoughts kept drifting back to Amsterdam, imagining Lidewij Vliegenthart and her boyfriend bicycling around town on this crazy mission to find a dead kid's last correspondence. How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart's bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the ca.n.a.ls and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafes drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn.

I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

That is probably true even if you live to be ninety-although I'm jealous of the people who get to find out for sure. Then again, I'd already lived twice as long as Van Houten's daughter. What he wouldn't have given to have a kid die at sixteen.

Suddenly Mom was standing between the TV and me, her hands folded behind her back. "Hazel," she said. Her voice was so serious I thought something might be wrong.

"Yes?"

"Do you know what today is?"

"It's not my birthday, is it?"

She laughed. "Not just yet. It's July fourteenth, Hazel."

"Is it your birthday?"

"No . . ."

"Is it Harry Houdini's birthday?"

"No . . ."

"I am really tired of guessing."

"IT IS BASTILLE DAY!" She pulled her arms from behind her back, producing two small plastic French flags and waving them enthusiastically.

"That sounds like a fake thing. Like Cholera Awareness Day."

"I a.s.sure you, Hazel, that there is nothing fake about Bastille Day. Did you know that two hundred and twenty-three years ago today, the people of France stormed the Bastille prison to arm themselves to fight for their freedom?"

"Wow," I said. "We should celebrate this momentous anniversary."

"It so happens that I have just now scheduled a picnic with your father in Holliday Park."

She never stopped trying, my mom. I pushed against the couch and stood up. Together, we cobbled together some sandwich makings and found a dusty picnic basket in the hallway utility closet.

It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and humid-the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world. Dad was waiting for us, wearing a tan suit, standing in a handicapped parking spot typing away on his handheld. He waved as we parked and then hugged me. "What a day," he said. "If we lived in California, they'd all be like this."

"Yeah, but then you wouldn't enjoy them," my mom said. She was wrong, but I didn't correct her.

We ended up putting our blanket down by the Ruins, this weird rectangle of Roman ruins plopped down in the middle of a field in Indianapolis. But they aren't real ruins: They're like a sculptural re-creation of ruins built eighty years ago, but the fake Ruins have been neglected pretty badly, so they have kind of become actual ruins by accident. Van Houten would like the Ruins. Gus, too.

So we sat in the shadow of the Ruins and ate a little lunch. "Do you need sunscreen?" Mom asked.

"I'm okay," I said.

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. Dad saw me watching the kids and said, "You miss running around like that?"

"Sometimes, I guess." But that wasn't what I was thinking. I was just trying to notice everything: the light on the ruined Ruins, this little kid who could barely walk discovering a stick at the corner of the playground, my indefatigable mother zigzagging mustard across her turkey sandwich, my dad patting his handheld in his pocket and resisting the urge to check it, a guy throwing a Frisbee that his dog kept running under and catching and returning to him.

Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to a.s.sert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

My dad was waving his hand in front of my face. "Tune in, Hazel. Are you there?"