The last time Ellie's world had ended, she'd closed her eyes one month and opened her eyes in another. Time and truth had simply vanished under layers of instinct until one day she'd found herself at the Library again. Conscious again. It had been months now since she'd first reentered civilization: so many days spent allowing herself to open, to learn to live with others again, to interact with them and grow to love them. Now --
It was as if she were slipping backward again.
Ellie would never see David again; that was something she'd been sure of since Evan had pulled her away from the woods, a deep ache down in her gut. Now she felt she was staring down a long dark hallway instead. A slippery slope. Perhaps it looked like the laboratory she'd worked in as an undergraduate, before Miah had gone away for treatment, or the dormitory she'd been pulled out of for treatment herself only months later. Sadness was like her grandmother's old apartment: any number of small, desperate spaces Ellie's heart had locked itself in before. She felt as if she'd been crying for weeks already; whenever she opened her eyes, they were rimmed with deep red, circled underneath with new darkness. She knew what it would mean, if she couldn't find some way to live with what had happened.
I don't want to think about it.
Instead she thought of everything else.
The sight of her old friend in the doorway lifted Ellie out of her reverie; she blinked once, as if suddenly waking, and watched him approach with pained, owlish eyes. The apartment had felt very different lately. Skit had been here more often, for one, and now so had Miah. Dog had taken up the side of the bed that David would have slept in, if it weren't for the fact that he was gone. The world was changing. The world was horrible and good. Wrong and perfect and endless.
She blinked again, wetting her lips. There was food now, and forks to eat it with, but Ellie could only squint, shrugging loosely under one of David's shirts. They'd always been far too large.
"You aren't alone, though. You're sitting with me."