My father's answer was revenge-has always been revenge-and the outcome was just, but not better. Nothing is fixed.

Across the room, Petra is a dark shape, blurred around the edges. She's walking back and forth, touching the walls. I wish she would sit down. We've been here forever.

I'm dressed like I belong here, in one of the silver tunics I used to wear, glossy and reflective. My Freddy sweater is lost somewhere on Earth. Truman's is nothing but ash.

"Daphne."

I look up and Obie is standing in the doorway, just the way he did before, when he came to tell me he was leaving. Only now he's disheveled and bloody, holding Raymie in his arms like he'll never let her go. His departure seems like a lifetime ago.

He crosses the room and sits down beside me with Raymie in his lap. She waves shyly at me, but doesn't say anything.

"You have to stop crying," Obie tells me, as though he doesn't understand that I can't. "I know this hurts, but they're gone and we have to manage without them now."

His voice is steady, but I can see the devastation in his eyes. He's only pretending, saying the words he's supposed to say. He's ministering to me when he should be crying alongside me.

In his arms, Raymie is quiet. I barely remember the moments after Truman's death, but it was loud and bright and messy. She must have seen.

"Daphne," Obie says. "You have to find a way to live without him now. You have to carry on."

But he has someone to carry on for.

Out the window, everything is dim. Petra gets out the paint set, crouching on the floor beside us. Her first strokes are mysterious, but the picture quickly becomes a horse. Its tail is long and soft. Then, under her careful brush, the horse sprouts a single horn. The sky is as dim as it ever gets and the furnace will come on soon.

I watch Petra, with her wide eyes and silvery skin, her liquid-looking hair, and suddenly, I see that she's very beautiful bending over her unicorn. With the tip of her brush she shapes its flank as carefully as she once rendered my face in eyeliner and now I know, undeniably, that time passes. It was a different girl who sat on the hassock while her ugly sister drew pictures.

She touches the picture and the paint rubs off on her fingers, leaving round depressions along the unicorn's body. Outside, the furnace hums and the sky glows red.

Obie is quiet, looking at us both with painful tenderness. I watch to see if the blood on his arms will catch fire and smolder to nothing, but it doesn't. Of course it doesn't. The cuts are his condition now. He brought it like Beelzebub brought his flies. Like the tears dripping slowly and constantly down my face.

The four of us sit quietly, staring down as Petra's painting begins to bubble and crack. Thin columns of smoke rise up from a unicorn glowing red. The brush in her hand becomes a torch.

She looks at me over her burning picture. "Unicorns can't last here."

On Earth, Alexa Harding, with her muddy-colored hair and skinned knees, is already forgetting about Truman Flynn. Putting on eye makeup, fumbling in someone's backseat. Truman was a boy she knew once when she was young. I want to scream suddenly, but when I open my mouth nothing comes out.

"There was a girl," Petra says, putting her hand in the fire. "A girl who fell asleep, and when she did, so did everyone around her. The whole kingdom just fell asleep."

I nod because it sounds real and possible. It sounds like a story I know.

Truman was like that once, motionless, diverting people from his pain, reassuring them and soothing them, sinking farther into the depths of his own grief.

But then one day, he woke up.

More than anything, I want to wake up from this.

On the roof, my mother is sitting on her filigree bench like she's waiting for me. I want to climb into her lap. I want to lie against her shoulder and never get up again. This is what Earth has done to me. But I know that's not true. It's what I've always wanted, but never understood.

Instead, I sit next to her and stare blankly down at the sundial. My face stares back at me, red-eyed.

"Tell me what to do," I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

"What makes you think I know?"

I had almost forgotten how her voice has the power to cut through me. She looks over, looks right at me with grim, silvery eyes and I see a black hollow in her, like seeing the future. Like looking down the barrel of a gun.

"I'm not kind-hearted," she says. "If I had my way, I would tell you to stop loving that boy. I would tell you to stop being sad."

"I can't."

She watches her reflection in the sundial, combing her fingers through her hair. "Then you need to find him."

It's what I want to hear, but the very idea is impossible. I shake my head, just barely. "He's in Heaven. How can someone like me find him in Heaven?"

She shrugs. "Who am I to tell you what you are? You're half an angel, just the same as he is."

"I don't even know how to get there," I whisper. "I don't know the way in."

"What is it that ties you to him?"

I close my eyes and the shapes of the garden are still printed in negative on the inside of my eyelids. I want to keep my eyes closed forever, and everything reminds me of Truman. The tree, how it made him turn his face away and how he kissed me anyway.

"I have his sadness," I say with my eyes closed. "He gave it to me."

"Then take it back to him," my mother says. "Take it to the place where it was the strongest. The place that speaks to him."

I nod, thinking about love and sadness, and how they've started to feel the same. I remember kissing Truman on the balcony, and maybe he never said he loved me, but he meant it anyway.

And there's my mother, shrieking in pain when she thought something had happened to her son, and Myra with her sly smile and her dead eyes, grieving for Deirdre in the only way she knew how. My father, holding the razor to Beelzebub's throat, telling him that it would all be over in an instant.

I know about grief now. I know the complex weight of it, and more than that, I know where to take Truman's.

In the terminal, I press my palm to the pass panel, speak my word, and the door gasps open, revealing the corridor. I follow it, keeping track of the turns, stepping out of the hallway and into Cicero.

SINKING.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE.

The air under the bridge is cool, but not like it was when I first came to Earth. It's dusk, and the streets are windy and deserted, rattling with fallen leaves from the park down the block. Autumn, then.

For a long time, I just stand under the bridge, looking out at Cicero. Everything is the same, but incrementally different, just like I'm the same, but not. My eyes feel swollen and hot, but I've finally stopped crying.

I find the Avalon apartment complex by memory. The door is still broken, and inside, the air is stale with cigarette smoke and dusty carpet. I stand in the lobby, breathing it, then step into the stairwell and start up to the fourth floor.

Alexa is sitting on the landing with her feet pulled up and her back against the wall, reading a paperback. When she glances up, her expression registers confusion, and then shock. We just look at each other, and for a second, she doesn't say anything.

I climb the stairs and I stand over her, waiting for some sign that I'm in the right place. Some revelation. The silence echoes around us and time stretches out.

"You look the same," she says finally.

I don't know if I'm the same or not. It doesn't feel like it, but I suppose that if it's worth remarking on, I must be. She isn't. Her hair is shorter and in the bright florescent light of the stairwell, her face seems older, more cynical and more wary.

"You've been crying," she says, and her voice is gentler than before.

I nod, mildly surprised that it shows on my face. I should have known, though. Everything feels scalded.

Alexa nods. "Yeah, I did too for awhile. I wait for him," she says, staring down at the book. "But he never comes back."

"No," I say, surprised by how normal I sound. "He can't."

She nods. "I figured. It was almost kind of inevitable, I guess-like, meant to be. You just showed up one day, and then he was gone. I mean, I don't blame you or anything. He was on his way out anyway."

I want to tell her that it isn't like she thinks. Truman didn't swan-dive into oblivion. He wasn't carried away in a wash of carelessness or self-destruction. He was noble. At the end, he was good.

The stairwell is narrow, cold. I glance up and Alexa follows my gaze.

"Charlie still lives here, if you're looking for him. He should be home by now."

I thank her but don't start up the stairs. I feel like the moment is more significant than our strange, sad gazes and our silence. I should have something to say.

For a minute, I just stand there looking down at her. Then she holds out her hand and I take it. The gesture is familiar and she smiles, a slow, sad smile that makes something ache inside me.

"You should go up," she says. "I think he'd like to see you."

On the fourth floor, I'm gripped by an even more crushing feeling of familiarity, of finality. In the hall, I hesitate at the door of 403, hand raised. I already know how this goes-Charlie shambling to the door in his undershirt, looking irritable and rumpled.

But when I knock, he answers almost at once. He stands in the doorway, looking worn-out, but perfectly alert.

For a long time, he doesn't say anything. Then he passes a hand over his face and shakes his head. "He isn't here."

"I know."

"Then why'd you come back?" His voice sounds defeated.

"I needed to see you." I don't know how to say what I really need, the thing that brought me to his door. I need to see the apartment, to find out if any vestige of Truman is still here.

Charlie closes his eyes for a moment. Then he opens the door wider and steps aside to let me in.

The apartment is different now, sparser and cleaner, if that were possible. Lonely. Charlie's wearing a blue mechanic's jacket, like he just got home, and I understand that he doesn't work nights anymore. It's impossible to think that his life has gone on without Truman, but it's true. Things have changed so much, even in a few months.

"Come on in and sit down." Charlie leads me into the kitchen.

I must look worse than I feel, because he takes a seat across from me and regards me kindly. "Why don't you tell me what happened."

"He died."

Charlie doesn't react immediately, but it's clear that those were not the words he was expecting. He sits at the table with his head in his hands. "What do you want, Daphne?"

"To bring him back."

"From the dead?" Charlie's voice is derisive, but his shoulders slump. He looks broken.

"It's happened before."

For a moment, he doesn't move. Then he raises his head and looks at me. He looks at me a long time, and his look tells me he knows that I am not the thing I pretend to be. Not some girl off the street. Not harmless, not human.

Jesus is still hanging patiently over the kitchen door, and Charlie believes in miracles and mysteries.

"I'd like to see the apartment," I say. "If that's all right."

We pass through the living room and down the hall, which feels unbearably like Truman. Even though there's no solid evidence of him, no belongings or photographs, the whole apartment breathes him. His feelings and his memories are here, and even the furniture and the walls are steeped in all the tiny, priceless moments of his life.

His bedroom is just as it was the last time I saw it, but abandoned now, colder. The shades are down and the floor is dusty.

Behind me, Charlie breathes a heavy sigh, but doesn't say anything.

Across the hall, the bathroom is small and cramped, exactly as I remember. It's chilly and white, and every tile and fixture screams Truman.

I understand that Charlie has not let him go. Alexa still waits for him, holding vigil, and in their sorrow, they keep him alive. Truman might have died on a nameless street in a nameless city, but here in the Avalon, it's like he has never left the building. His memory is a palpable thing, more solid here than in any other place on earth. They carry him with them.

With my heart beating much too hard, I step into the bathroom and sit down in the bottom of the tub. When I turn on the faucet and lie back, the water rushes around me.

"What are you doing?" Charlie asks, but his voice is gentle. Not the tone one would normally use to speak to a strange girl in his bathroom, lying in the tub in all her clothes.

"Following him," I say, because there's no other way to say it. The fabric here is so thin. This is the place he lost everything.

Standing over me, Charlie looks dim and faceless, the overhead light making a blinding starburst behind him.

I close my eyes and remember pain and longing that are not mine. Truman's memories wash over me in a chaotic wave and I hold my breath and let the water cover me. Underwater, I feel suddenly free, like I'm falling down. I'm closer to him than I have ever been, in the one place he was sadder than any other, and still, I'm filled with a strange, unbridled joy.

Charlie let me into the apartment because he loved Truman. He's not dragging me out of the tub now for the same reason. He's ready, like I am, to go as far as it takes. Ready to try anything.

The breathlessness hits and when it does, the sensation is not grief, but a celebration of Truman's life-all the laughter and the longing and the tragedy. I'm taking it with me. It's taking me down through the cluttered museum of memory. Taking me to him.

HEAVEN.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX.