When the Sky Fell on Splendor(102)

Lucky.

But then there was Wayne, who’d climbed into the back of a Suburban and been driven away from the remnants of his home.

He got what he needed, Arthur sometimes told me when he caught me thinking about it, and ran a hand over my back. He looked back at us, right before he got into the car, and I knew he got what he needed.

Whenever he said this, I remembered that day at the park, when we shot our first episode: Sheriff Nakamura, sitting on a park bench, staring toward the wooded trail as we crowded into it, his eyebrows dented and one corner of his mouth lifted. Like he was seeing the ghost of someone he loved.

Not like it didn’t hurt. Not like he’d gotten everything he wanted, but like when he looked at Remy, moving down that sunlight-dappled path, he had everything he needed.

That was all we could hope for. Still, as Nick pressed the gas and we sped away from the Jenkins House, I thought about Wayne crashing headlong into the dirt of his home, snorting it up into the back of his nose and tasting it between his teeth, letting home fill his senses.

I looked up and searched the sky for a falling star.

Whether I could see any or not, I knew there were lights out there, blazing through the dark.

And then I looked back down at Splendor, stretched out around me.

The air was warm and sticky, Sofía’s rosewater floating on the breeze. The faint moo of sleepy cattle drifted up at our backs, and the rutted road unspooled in front of us, like it knew where we needed to be.

Sometimes a black hole rips through your life. Something—maybe even the thing you love the most—implodes, collapses right in front of you. And the gravitational force of the thing it forms is so strong it pulls on everything else, warps the very fabric of your little place in space-time.

It bends the past around you so it keeps repeating, and you can’t see what comes next.

You’ll want to run from it. You’ll want to escape before it can suck you into its darkness.

But black holes don’t really suck. And whatever falls into them isn’t really gone.

Even the light is just hidden. Just for now.

When I think of Mark, I picture him falling, diving headfirst toward the mysteries of the universe, a smile wide across his face. As he nears the event horizon, he moves slower and slower, and then he stops. Hovering, frozen.

There he is, in my sight, forever. And even while that’s true, he’s also somewhere else. He’s crossing an invisible threshold, and there, then, he sees it.

The answers. The past. The future. The light.

Everything, all at once.

He laughs. I know he laughs.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS



First and foremost, I’d like to thank my amazing agent, Lana Popovi?, who has been such a champion of this book, and of me, since the very beginning. Working with you has been a joy and an honor, and I can’t thank you enough.

Thanks also to my wonderful editor, Marissa Grossman, whose keen eye and brilliant mind were essential to this book’s development, and to Alex Sanchez, another indispensible set of eyes and hands that coaxed this book into shape. Huge thanks as well to Ben Schrank and everyone else at Razorbill, especially Jennifer Dee, Corina Lupp, Phyllis DeBlanche, Vivian Kirklin, Abigail Powers, and Marinda Valenti. Thank you all for the parts you played in bringing this book to life, beautifying it, and getting it into the hands of readers. It means so much to me.

Thank you also to Bri Cavallaro, my one-person competition cheerleading team, and to Parker Peevyhouse, Jeff Zentner, Janet McNally, Anna Breslaw, Bethany Morrow, Kerry Kletter, Shannon Parker, Marisa Reichardt, Candice Montgomery, Tehlor Kay Mejia, and all the other supernaturally kind and talented YA people who make this a place I love being. I hope I know you in all the parallel universes where I don’t have this job too.

Thank you so much to Jordan, my de facto first reader, one of my biggest and best supporters, the reader I most truly aim to please (if you are happy with a book, then I know I will also be).

This book is about family, and I couldn’t have written it without mine. Thank you to my grandparents, my parents, my brothers, my sisters, and all the weirdos I was lucky enough to love and be loved by while growing up, especially the Frisches and Sjogrens, who let us run wild through their homes.

And finally, thank you to Joey: You have beautiful hair and are so, so nice, and I love you.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Emily Henry is the author of The Love That Split the World and A Million Junes. She is a full-time writer, proofreader, and donut connoisseur. She studied creative writing at Hope College and the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. She tweets @EmilyHenryWrite.