My heart is slamming in my chest as I shake Ash into sitting up, and I can feel the second he sees it by the way his body jerks against mine. Slowly, I turn back to look at Ash’s mother, and I’m blinking through tears to see that she’s smiling at me.

“We wanted it to be a surprise,” she says. And that’s when I really start crying.

They cleaned it. Autumn and Roth and York and Maisie. Ash’s parents. Them and a handful of people they’d recruited, they’d cleaned out the whole house.

Ash and I walk through the house in a daze, leaning on each other for support. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot. There’s still work to be done, walls to be painted, boxes of things they deemed important to go through. But those are stacked up neatly in the corners of the rooms, and the color of the walls was never my problem. My mother’s hoard was. And it’s gone.

I’m crying again, and I’ve shed so many tears lately that my face actually aches from it. But Ash is gripping my hand like a lifeline, and every time I turn to him, he’s smiling at me.

“I can’t believe it,” he says. “I’m thinking maybe I’m still in the hospital, and they’ve got me on the really, really good drugs.”

I laugh and sniffle, reaching up with my injured hand to wipe away what I can from my wet face. “Then how do you explain the fact that I can see it, too?” I ask. He smiles and leans over to press a kiss to my temple.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m pretty sure it’s real. And if not, then it just means I’m sharing the good drugs. Win-win.”

My laugh comes out like a sob, and I feel a gentle hand land on my elbow. I turn and see Autumn and Roth, and I drop Ash’s hand briefly so that I can reach out and wrap my arms around them both. “I can’t believe you did this,” I whisper.

They squeeze me back, Roth a little bit uncomfortably, and I’m struck by a sudden urge to reach up and ruffle his hair. He’s so bad at being a real boy. Instead, I just lean into them both, and Autumn nuzzles into my shoulder.

“What else were we supposed to do?” she asks, and when she pulls back I can see that she’s been crying, too. “Just leave it while you guys were in the hospital? There was work to be done.”

I pull out of her embrace, but reach down with my good hand and squeeze her hand in my own. “Thank you,” I say, but I have to force the words out through the boulder in my throat. She squeezes my hand back, but then she doesn’t let it go. I look up at her through aching, tear-damp eyes, and she tugs on my hand. “Come on,” she says, pulling me gently forward. “There’s something I want to show you, something we found.”

I let her pull me through the house, down hallways I haven’t seen the floor of since I was a little kid, past pictures on the walls that I barely recognize. Finally, we stop at a door. It’s the door to my childhood bedroom. Even after months of working on the house with Ash, we’d never even gotten close to making it this far. Keeping my hand in hers, Autumn reaches out and opens the door.

And the bottom drops out of my world.

The walls. They’re murals. Image upon image, layered together to form a single story told in pictures. Horses and pigs with wings, unicorns and princes and even a princess with her very own sword, wielding it against a fearsome fire-breathing dragon. I want to look everywhere, all at once, but instead I’m frozen, standing sagged against the door jam, my heart in my throat.

It has been so long, so long that I had forgotten.

My father had painted these.

He’d painted them for me.

And now they’re mine again. I sag back against Ash, who’d followed after us, and I’m caught between laughing and crying. I never thought I’d find any of his art ever again. Now I have a whole room of it, a thousand images to choose from.

“Thank you,” I whisper, turning and burying my face in Ash’s shoulder because I don’t know what else to do. His hand comes to rest on my back, rubbing up and down and I see Maisie come up behind him, tears in her own eyes.

“There’s one more thing,” she says, and for the first time I notice the shoe box she’s holding. She looks down at it, strokes her fingers over the top of it. “We found it when we were cleaning.”

She holds it out to me, and I pull away from Ash just enough so that I can reach out and take it. It’s lighter than I expect, but still my arm sags, exhausted. “What is it?” I ask, holding it out to Ash so that he can help me remove the lid. But I don’t need them to answer. As soon as the lid’s off, I can tell what it is.

It’s letters. Dozens of them.

I turn to Autumn, confused, and she gives me a sad little smile. “They’re from your mother,” she says. “They’re for you.”

All of a sudden, I can’t take it anymore, and the gentle stream of tears that has been escaping my eyes turns into a torrent, and I collapse against Ash.

These people, right here. They’ve given me everything. Their time, their care.

Their love.

They’ve even given me the impossible.

They’ve given me my parents back.

Ash

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask as Star settles down next to me on the bench. It’s not even dark out yet, but the campfire York built before he and the others left for the evening is already crackling away in front of us.

“Definitely,” she says, and shifts around so that she can drop the box Autumn had handed her from underneath her good arm into her lap, without using her injured hand. Not gonna lie, I’m so so glad that we both survived the crash, and that we managed to do so without any life-altering injuries, but I’m fucking gutted that she lost her finger. And no matter what a brave face she puts on, I know she is, too. The pinkie-swearing was kind of our thing. But I’d rather have Star with me than just about anything else, even our stupid little ritual.

I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since I woke up. The crash. Maybe if I’d done something different, we wouldn’t have been hit at all. Maybe if I had just taken her dancing, or not taken her out at all, or not looked at her or not gotten distracted, or a million other things, then we’d both be okay. Star caught me thinking about it once. It must have shown on my face, the guilt, because she asked me what was wrong. And after a token of resistance, I told her. I don’t know what I expected, I guess that she’d be pissed off at me or something, having realized I’ve messed her up permanently.

But all she did was roll her eyes at me.

“You’re an idiot,” she’d said, leaning over to give me a kiss to ease the sting of her words. “If you’d done anything different, yeah, we might have been okay. But at the same time, we might have died. So don’t be stupid and think about what-ifs okay? You’re here with me now, and we’re okay. That’s what matters.”

Then she’d stolen my Jell-O and winked at me. So that was that.

“But seriously,” I say, nodding down toward the box, reaching over to help her tug the lid off when she starts to struggle a bit. “These were from your mom. Are you sure you don’t want to keep them?”

She looks up at me, and there are tears in her eyes, but she nods. “I’m sure,” she says. “I can’t turn into her. I can’t keep everything. If you keep everything, you end up losing what’s most important.” And it’s true. Her mom kept everything, but lost Star. I feel my own eyes start to prick at the thought of what that woman must have gone through, and reach over to wrap my arm around her shoulders. “Okay,” I say. “If you’re sure.”

“I am,” she says. “Besides, this way, I get to say goodbye to her on my own terms. Not anybody else’s.”

I lean over and press a kiss to her mouth, holding her tight until I feel her start to relax, then I pull away. Her eyes are shining with tears, but she nods and reaches down into the box and pulls out the first letter.