Amelia didn't know yet how to navigate through this strange new world of theirs.

It was as though her entire life up to this point could be divided into four periods, the first being before she met Colton. Then she was with him, and her life was suddenly much different than it had ever been before. She'd spent her time smiling in public and crying behind closed doors, and once spring had bloomed into summer, he'd formed this secret obsession with Lily Myers. Leaving him was possibly the most defining moment of Amelia's life to date, and with it came the era of her and Henry—falling in love right after both of their perceptions of the world had completely shattered apart, trying to relearn what was true and what was only in their heads. Naturally, right when they'd grown into this new way of existence and somewhat settled there was when the meteor hit, and now the world was once again a different place than the one they knew.

There was, of course, a much-warranted degree of celebration. Both Lily's parents and Henry's arrived at the hospital while Amelia was giving her witness report and Jen had found her in the waiting room afterward, still wilted on Nat's shoulder. But there had been tears—happy, relieved tears—shining in his mother's eyes when she rushed over to bundle Amelia up in a hug. She had scrunched her eyes shut and let Jen gently stroke her hair, knowing that there were so many things she was going to have to explain to her own mother if she wished to receive that kind of comfort from her.

She spent the next few weeks as somewhat of a recluse in her own apartment, doing her work from home both because she was liable to burst into tears at even the slightest provocation and because detectives kept knocking at her door unannounced to talk to her.

The reckoning with her parents had been forced to come quickly. Less than forty-eight hours after they'd found Lily, it was plastered all over the morning news that there was a manhunt for an officer Colton Maine, who had conveniently gone off the grid and not shown up to his job on Monday morning. Amelia had watched from her couch as a picture of him in his uniform popped up onscreen—a picture that she herself had taken months ago and then passed off to the detectives just one day prior to help them identify who they were looking for.

Her lungs suddenly felt very, very tight. It wasn't like she herself was in the photograph, but that hardly mattered now that his name and face had been put out there. Everyone who knew her at all, who had looked at just a singular one of her social media posts while she'd been with him, was about to realize that the man she'd been romantically linked with was now a fugitive.

And everyone who'd ever known Lily Myers, who knew that she had come home under mysterious circumstances on the same day that this officer was accused of taking a woman hostage, was going to be able to put those pieces together, too.

It took all of two minutes for Amelia's phone to be barraged with texts and phone calls.

A week had passed and she'd barely spoken to Henry at all.

It had nothing to do with him not wanting to talk to her, but there were only so many hours in a day and he was being tugged in so many directions at once. Between checking in on Lily at least once every day—after she was discharged from the hospital, it'd been decided that she should stay at her parents' house for the time being—showing up to his job, cramming for the final exams in his classes that he'd barely been able to focus on all semester, and being pestered by the detectives just as much as the rest of them were, he could barely even fit in a few hours of sleep each night. He was sending her incremental texts to keep her up to speed about how Lily was doing, but Amelia went days without actually getting to hear his voice.

But she herself was also holding back from him. She felt like her body was caving in on itself, that she was crumpling beneath the shame that gnawed at her incessantly, the fear of what the future held. She could have carved out a minute of time to be with him. She could have shown up at his place in the middle of the night and talked to him while he studied, or perhaps even made herself useful for once by cooking dinner for him. But she didn't do any of that. She felt like she was doing him a favor by keeping him at an arm's length while she tried to work through her own emotions first.

And yet, as the days trickled on like sand slipping through an hourglass, it must have become more and more obvious to him that she was shutting him out. There were calls she didn't answer, texts she pretended not to see. She longed for the warmth of him beside her when she was alone in her sheets, shedding more tears after reading another half-assed apology text she'd gotten from her mom for being insensitive about the Colton breakup back when it happened. She wanted him there to hold her hand in the waiting room at Dr. Foster's office.

But more than any of that, she didn't want anyone thinking that she was trying to make Lily's situation about herself. So she was going to grit her teeth and pull herself together a little bit more before she threw herself back into the fray.

On day seven, she heard her doorbell ring and somehow knew that it was him.

It was approaching 10 p.m., but this time of year that meant that the sun had already been down for several hours. Amelia was wearing a set of old pajamas, having intended to crawl into bed shortly and numb her brain with Netflix until she could fall asleep. When she opened the door, he looked weary, his nose and ears tinged pink from the cold as if he'd stood there for a while deliberating if she would even consider talking to him or if he should just leave.

From one of his hands dangled a grocery bag, which was presumably for her. Amelia tried to smile a little bit as she let him inside and he immediately went to the kitchen to start putting the food in her embarrassingly empty cabinets.

"You didn't have to do that," she mumbled as she sank onto the couch.

"You don't have any food," he said simply, and that was the end of that conversation.

Her heart simultaneously softened and ached—she felt like the roles should have been reversed, like she should have been the one doing all of this for him.

Henry sat on the opposite end of the couch and they silently watched each other for a moment, like strangers.

"What are we doing?" he finally asked her.

"I'm going to need you to be a little more specific."

He let out a small sigh through his nose, but the frustration wasn't necessarily directed at her. He seemed to ponder his words for another moment before continuing.

"I spend every waking hour thinking about you."

He said it with equal parts tenderness and firmness, looking directly at Amelia though he didn't dare move towards her. "I try not to and then I think that surely I should be able to forget for one second, but I can't. I can't stop it and yet we've barely breathed a word to one another since we had to split up in the hospital."

Quietly, she told him, "You know I feel guilty."

"And I feel guilty, too," he said. "I feel horrible. We all saw her in the bar that night and I couldn't even recognize her–"

"–We saw the back of her head while she was wearing a hoodie, Henry. She didn't look like anybody. That's not your fault."

"But nothing is your fault, either! We're not on separate teams here—we both feel guilty for things we shouldn't feel guilty for."

Amelia inhaled slowly, shakily, searching for the right words while everything in her head felt like a jumbled mess, like she didn't even know how to string letters together into proper words anymore.

"I was with him the day it happened," she eventually reminded him in a quivering whisper. "I was the one keeping his side of the bed warm while he was off doing–"

Whatever he was off doing to her. She couldn't say it aloud; it was going to make her sick again.

"You realize that, don't you? It's not the same, Henry."

"I know it's not," he deflated. "I just—I want you to talk to me."

With eyebrows raised, she remarked, "I don't know how you're even forgiving me right now."

It came out almost like a scoff, but she felt her eyes watering.

"There's nothing to forgive you for."

Amelia paused to swallow the unpleasant, sticky feeling that had arisen in her mouth; to backtrack and try to explain herself better. It shouldn't have been so hard to say that she couldn't pour from an empty cup and yet it was somehow immensely difficult.

"Maybe there isn't," she conceded, if only to stop them from going around in circles for ages about it. "And I want to be with you, Henry—I love you, and there isn't a minute when I'm not wanting to be with you, either. You're the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last when I fall asleep."

"Then why won't you let me be with you?" he pleaded.

"I want to be with you more than I've ever wanted anything," she stopped him.

Even now, she wanted to crush all of the space between them, to kiss him until she couldn't breathe and hear him murmur her own name against her lips. To beg him to do whatever he could do to make her forget, even if he could only make it last for one sweet second.

"But I'm not going to be any good for you or Lily or anyone else until I've had more time to be able to forgive myself," she continued. "I keep replaying all of these conversations I had with him and wondering why he would ever do that to her when I was the one right in front of him. If I was too much for him; if I wasn't enough for him; if I was too boring or too unlovable to satisfy him."

Hurt flickered across Henry's face at the mere suggestion.

"And then," she added tightly. "After I've played through all of these options a few times, I sit around and ask myself what kind of fucking narcissist I am for acting like I somehow got the short end of the straw here."

Amelia wasn't sure at what point she'd started crying, just that her cheeks were now wet. Soundlessly, Henry stood up from the couch and came around the backside of it, as if he wanted to come to her and put his arms around her from behind, to kiss her on the cheek and tell her it was all going to be okay. Or perhaps just bury his face in her hair, remind himself that she was real.

But he didn't do any of that, though he seemed to consider it. He reached down momentarily to cover one of her hands with both of his own, then let her go.

"I want to be good to you, Henry," she whispered. "And I can't do that yet, so I need you to hold out for me a little longer. I'm so sorry."

Amelia was feeling slightly more composed by the time there was another knock on her door three nights later, but only slightly.

As she walked over to the door, she ran through several options of what she might say to Henry, but when she looked out the peephole—there was no such thing as being too cautious nowadays—the face she saw was Liam's.

She drew the door open, mildly relieved and mildly confused.

"Hi..." she said. "...Did Henry send you?"

"No," he told her with a slight shake of his head, though the question didn't seem to surprise him. "He doesn't know I'm here. I did bring you a present, though."

Amelia hadn't even noticed that he had a bag slung over his shoulder until he reached into it and withdrew a generously-sized bottle of tequila. A dry laugh slipped past her lips—she certainly hadn't expected anyone to try to win her over with liquor—but it was the first time she had laughed at anything in days. She was also sure she already had some cocktail fixings, so she gratefully took the bottle and let him inside.

"So," she asked as he shrugged off his winter coat and left it on the back of one of her kitchen chairs. "Did you want to talk about me or you or her?"

"Maybe a little bit about everyone," he admitted, sinking into the chair that he'd pulled out. "But mostly just to see how you're doing."

She nearly regurgitated a very similar explanation to the one she'd given Henry, but right before the words could tumble out of her mouth, she remembered that once upon a time Liam had also been in a relationship with someone who had hurt him badly enough to leave behind a scar. So although he could never literally walk in her shoes, he'd gotten about as close as he could ever come to it. For some reason, this conjured up a humorous image in her head of him literally trying to stuff his feet into her tennis shoes, which almost made her giggle out loud.

So she told him candidly, "Not great. I'm getting there, I guess. It just really sucks that it's happening so slowly."

He nodded in a thoughtful manner that suggested she'd given a perfectly acceptable response.

"I...yeah, I kind of get it. That's where I feel like I'm at with Lils. So much of it really has nothing to do with me, you know? I could stay with her 24/7 and there'd still barely be anything I can do to help, to make the healing happen any faster or slower. I just have to sit aside and wait, really."

"And how is that making you feel?" Amelia nudged, playing her best attempt at a therapist.

His lips curved into the wry, self-deprecating sort of smirk. "Fucking infuriated," he said simply. "Not at her, but at just about everything else."

Amelia hopped up to retrieve two shot glasses from her cabinet. She wasn't about to irresponsibly let him drink himself into numbness before he got back in the car—she herself had been trying not to dull her aches with alcohol—but they could both use a little something to take the edge off.

And he downed his shot without even the tiniest grimace at the way it burned, but he didn't reach for the bottle to immediately pour himself another, either.

"What we had before," he sighed, and Amelia knew that she was about to get some much-craved insight into his and Lily's relationship, "It was everything I could have wanted and we both worked really damn hard to get there, too. I realized as soon as she was gone that even if she came back, we were never going to be able to return to that place—but I don't think I've stopped wishing that we could. And now that I get to see her again, that I'm not using up all my energy just struggling to imagine her face, I can remember everything that happened in those two years with her so much more clearly."

Amelia's mouth curved into a frown. She understood what he was saying in the sense that she saw it as being impossible for anyone to understand at all—losing someone and wanting them back more than anything else in the world was hardly uncommon, but for two people to change this fundamentally over such a short span of time and then have to figure out how to navigate a preexisting relationship as their new selves? That was more like the stuff of books and movies, and those stories tended to get wrapped up in a very nice bow at the end.

In real life, it seemed a lot more like Liam and Lily were stuck in purgatory, a life where they didn't know yet what all of their grief for each other was ever going to amount to. Maybe it would be everything—but maybe it would be nothing at all.

"But," he added after seeing her expression, his own features softening. "At least we have a chance now at being happy again. And at least we both want to take it. After everything that's happened, I can't really ask for more than that."

Amelia nodded, confessing, "I feel that in my own way. In that I obviously wish that I'd never gotten involved with him in the first place, but I wouldn't be with Henry now if I hadn't. I don't know that there's anything in the world that could make me want to undo getting to have what we do."

As she was voicing these thoughts out loud, it was easy to recall when Henry echoed a very similar sentiment to her—that he wouldn't trade her safety away for anything at all, not even to have Lily back. Only now did she fully understand the immense gravity of that, how much he would have to love her to say that and mean it.

"I can't promise you that the hardest part is over," she told Liam, because there was truly no telling what the road ahead of them all looked like. "But I can promise to be your drinking buddy when it's too difficult to deal with alone. I'm not going anywhere."

And he cracked a true smile at that, one that wasn't hidden by a veneer of sarcasm or self-loathing. And it was there, in that glimpse of honest joy, that Amelia found their salvation:

Hope.

As long as they had this, one day they would be alright.