CHAPTER EIGHT
shadow business

NOBODY IN FORKS EVER SWIMS. Under the category of universally acknowledged facts, that's the one truth Violet can swear by. The first time she's ever swum here in Forks (vacations elsewhere don't count) had been at a community pool that'd been drained and never filled back up again. If people want water, they go to La Push. But it's not very often that the weather cooperates amicably with plans, and every time it's nice out, the drive down to the beach on the Reservation usually collects enough bad luck to shade the sky a little greyer, a little more prone to an unfriendly shower, and by the time the vehicle pulls into parking, there's a storm hitting the coastline.

So, it's a little surprising—to say the least—when Violet spots the cluster of tiny figures standing on the edge of the cliff that she never would've spied out of her peripheral vision if it weren't for the loud, euphoric war-cry that'd torn out of one of the boys' chests as he dove headfirst into the crashing waves.

After school had let out, ever-uneventful and filled with side-eyed glances from her peers in the hallways (Violet figured pulling a knife on someone in the girls' bathroom was a little difficult to forgive and forget), she'd dropped by her therapist's office. This time, she'd made the executive decision to loiter in the bathroom before heading to the waiting area for her three o'clock appointment at the very last minuet to avoid sparking anymore conversations with Finn from last session. Immediately after the hour was up, Violet had called Aaron to let him know that she'd be heading over to Sage's house on her own. In record time, she'd bolted from the psychiatrist's office building and zipped down to the border between La Push and Forks, and down the scenic route alongside the ocean. From there, the crashing waves, the squall of birds and the sound of her skateboard wheels roaring against the tarmac burns her favourite lullaby into her eardrums.

Now, this: a handful of boys, copper-skinned and bare-chested, standing on the edge of a cliff, two more in the ocean, goading the others to jump. Violet recognises Paul's shout before she sees him, screaming his head off as he hurls himself over the edge in an artless dive. Another boy follows after, flipping in midair before plunging into the unforgiving waves, swallowed by flotsam and foam. Amused, Violet stops, kicking her skateboard into her hand, and wanders as close as the edge of the road would let her.

Even from this distance, out of reach of the sea, Violet can feel the spray whipping into the wind as the tide slams persistently into rock, slowly chipping away at it one grain at a time. And there are the boys and a single girl with her dark hair falling in two braids down her muscular back—Kit! Violet realises with a jolt—forged by summer impulse and reckless bravado, taking turns to wrestle one another into the hungry waves. A wind picks up, fluttering renegade strands of her blonde hair into her face. Violet adjusts her maroon beanie so it parts her hair just right, keeping it out of her face, and shuffles closer to the edge. And looks down.

The world sways for a moment. Vertigo makes her head spin and her pulse thunder in her chest, but she can't look away from the waves beckoning her to another world, can't stop her mind from making its own demons, making the hundred-foot drop into the ocean seem more like thousands of miles. In the moment, a step forward seemed more appealing than breathing. What would it feel like, to look up from the bottom of the ocean, to see the sun under the surface of the sea?

The iron voice growls menacingly in her head.

—PATHETIC. REMEMBER WHAT YOU CAME BACK FOR. STEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE. WE ARE NOT FINISHED YET—

A bright orange pick-up truck growls to a stop on the side of the bending road, knocking her back into reality. The rumbling engine cuts and two people step out.

"Did you see that?" One of them—a girl with dark brown hair and porcelain skin—gasps, concern lacing her tone as she shuts the door of her truck and darts over to the edge of the road, dark eyes trained on the boys on the cliff. She spots Violet, standing beside her, skateboard tucked under her elbow, yellow backpack slung over her shoulder. But before the girl can open her mouth to say anything, the other person who'd exited the truck—a boy, built like a football player, with copper skin and long hair—laughs.

"They're not really fighting, Bella," he says, grinning, eyes lit up in amusement. "They're cliff diving. Scary as hell, but a total rush."

One of the boys take a leap off the edge, and both Violet and Bella turn to watch him shouting in glee on the way down, before he breaks through the waves and disappears underwater. Only to resurface again, laughing, shining.

"A rush," Bella murmurs, equal parts in awe and horrified.

"Most of us jump from lower down," the boy says, leant against the truck, hands tucked into his pockets. A bitter edge creeps into his tone. "Leave the showing off to Sam and his disciples."

Violet's ears prick up. Attentive, sharp. There was only one Sam she knew of, and if she had to take an educated guess as to which Sam this boy was speaking of, it'd be Sam Uley. Kit was one of those aforementioned 'disciples'. According to Sage, Kit had disappeared on her for a few weeks, growing muscle, height, and a brand new tattoo over her shoulder, a circular symbol. Sage had called it a cult tattoo. Something about Quilete business, Kit had deflected, but Violet had a feeling that there was more to the story than Kit was letting on. Staying to eavesdrop on the pair seemed like a smart option if she wanted answers, and if this boy knew something vital about them...

A puzzled expression creases Bella's pretty features. "Some kind of beef with them or something?"

"I don't know," the boy says, frowning, "they just think they run this place. Embry used to call them hall monitors on steroids," he scoffs, eyes trained on the boys on the cliff as Kit makes the jump. Two boys remain on the edge of the cliff. "Now look at him."

"That's Embry?"

"Yeah."

"What happened?" Bella asked.

"He missed some school," the boy mutters, a grudge lodged in his darkened tone. "Then all of a sudden he started following Sam around like a little puppy. Same thing happened with Paul and Jared. Sam keeps giving me this look, like he's waiting for me or something." There's a pregnant pause, but the weight of the boy's silence is crushing. Wariness chips at his brittle voice. Something deep and unsettling. "It's kind of starting to freak me out."

Familiar names. Fitting the pieces together, Violet's mind flies in a million directions whilst maintaining a laser focus on the conversation behind her. Kit has been awfully secretive about her freshly-induced involvement with those boys and Sam. No amount of pressing could get answers from her tight-lipped deflections. Asking Paul would lead Violet to a dead end, for sure, and she wasn't close enough to the others to grill them.

"Well, you should just avoid him," Bella says, irritably.

The boy's voice is small. A vulnerable child all of a sudden in the body of a copper-skinned god of six feet and sculpted muscle. "I try."

They're both silent now, gazing into the distance as Sam Uley makes his jump. In three powerful strides, he clears the short space to the edge, and pitches himself off with the grace of a cheetah leaping for its prey.

—ASK THEM NOW BEFORE THEY GO—

Violet turns to the boy and Bella, who're both still leaning against the hood of the orange truck. When she speaks, she can test her father's snappy command tumble off her tongue. "What can you tell me about Sam Uley's cult?"

The boy eyes Violet warily. "What's it to you?"

Violet lifts a brow. "My best friend and her brother are in it. Kit and Paul Lahote. You should know them. They go to school on the Rez. If they're in a cult that's gonna wreck their lives, then I have a right to be in the know."

Bella's frown deepens. "You don't go to school here?"

"I live in Forks," Violet says, flatly, "Kit won't tell me anything. I thought you might something."

The boy shifts in discomfort, flashing Violet a small, tentative smile. "Sorry to disappoint, but I don't."

Pinning him with a look filled with ice and mistrust, Violet slants him a tight smile. —HE'S NOT TELLING YOU SOMETHING— "Then you're useless to me."

Without a glance over her shoulder, Violet drops her skateboard on the ground, and tears toward Sage's house. Along the way, she glances up at the roiling clouds in the sky like runaway horses, the glimmering line of the horizon in the distance, the sun peeking out in broken fragments of cold light. Finally, she glimpses the sea, the crashing waves colliding like jousting knights on their stallions, the oldest thing on this entire planet. It's got to know something. Everybody's hiding something. Nobody seems to want to say what they're really thinking. First Kit, then Sam, and now this boy whose name she doesn't even know. Too many secrets, a cavity rotting away the enamel of this unholy town one layer at a time, a final abscess to be lanced away.

☾

AT ALL TIMES OF THE DAY you can hear the sea from Sage's house. A strange sort of siren calling, the static hush of waves roaring against the shore, this urgent pushing and pulling and pushing and pulling and you have to wonder, sometimes, if it's trying desperately to climb onto land or trying to warn you of something.

There's almost nothing between Sage's one-story house and the water. There's a rundown road, a pathetic lick of tarmac that'd been crumbling for years without maintenance since nobody wanted to fork up the cash to patch up the Reservation. There's a messy patch of skinny, sickly looking orange trees that are never in season, a small stretch of scrub and rope-like roots that stick out from the ground looking to trip you up if you don't look where you're stepping, and then dunes. During monsoon season, the walls and windows shake like a house in a hurricane and the sound the relentless assault of rain makes against the roof makes it seem like the world is ending.

Sage's bedroom window looks down upon the waves throwing up flotsam on the shore. Through the glass, Violet watches the sea, wondering if she can press her burning questions into the frigid water and see answers in the steam.

But the foamy waves, calm and blissfully rocking against the filthy beach as it is, seem to watch the events unfold with a dispassionate languor.

It's in this lackadaisical demeanour that Violet suspects the sea must know something. That there's definitely more to what the human eye will speculate. You can't witness a death without the aftershocks. There are secrets, Violet knows, and there are things to be discovered. Sometimes the lines blur and those two will intersect, sometimes they don't. Sometimes secrets are meant to be uprooted and exposed, naked in truth to the world. Sometimes secrets are meant to stay secrets. All for good reason.

"There's gum on the dresser, if you want," Sage says, pulling Violet out of her reverie. Sitting on her bed cross-legged, Sage had been busying herself with packing weed into little plastic baggies and stowing them away in a shoe box marked 'PRIVATE' that she'd procured from under her bed. Today's a Tuesday, so Violet isn't in violation of 'weed plantation care day', which is supposed to take place tomorrow.

Violet shakes her head. "I'm good."

"Are you? You look like you're giving yourself an ulcer." Sage punts a warped, half-finished tube of blue acrylic paint at Violet. It strikes her square in the stomach and bounces off. Arms crossed over her chest, Violet cuts Sage a cold glare. Sage jabs an accusatory finger at Violet. "Stop that. None of that shit in my room. This—" Sage makes a sweeping gesture with her arms— "is a place for creativity and freedom of spirit. You look like you're throwing yours into the gauntlet."

"If 'a place for creativity and freedom of spirit' translates to preschooler's bombsite, I couldn't agree more," Violet drawls, smirking.

"I'm an artist, Vi," Sage scoffs, turning her nose up, rolling her shoulders back and flipping her dreads over her shoulder in an attempt to affect a pretentious posture, "I don't expect you to understand."

Sage's room is littered with half-finished canvases, ideas that bleed from one incomplete idea to another, ideas that are never finished because there are too many in her head and she is stuck in a vicious cycle of making half-formed work while making more half-formed works because she can never finish one piece before another idea hits her and she absolutely has to paint it. Potted plants sit by the window. A whole garden variety of them. She makes the pots herself, out of clay stolen from the school's art room, glazes them in her room, and bakes them in her own oven. Sunlight hasn't touched the floorboards in years, Violet is sure of it. There's no other way around it: Sage's room is a disaster. The messiest out of all of Violet's friends'.

While Kit's is a nuanced balance, an exercise in entropy and order—always cleared of space because her friends are always over and they need space to hang out so she pushes her books into piles against the wall and against the foot of her bed, her dinosaur figurines and study guides are always shoved in corners, never organised—and Violet's room is always too clinical and too empty because she's hardly in it, Sage's room is chaos. It's an explosion of her person. A bomb site of everything she is passionate about running like watercolours with the vibrance of her personality. Knitting equipment is strewn all over the place (Violet's tripped over so many clumps of yarn that seemed to stitch together the entire room with how hopelessly tangled and endless they were), and Sage is forever losing things in the mess of her floor which she can hardly see with all the clothes and art and plants and knitted apparel and school materials carpeting the hardwood. It doesn't even have the charm or privilege of being called an organised mess. That's the main argument Sage's dad always has about her room.

Violet rolls her eyes. "You said you wanted help with harvesting your pot?"

"That's right," Sage declares, as though Violet's just been given the opportunity of a lifetime. She dumps the plastic baggies into the shoe box and slides it into the abyss under her bed. Jumping to her feet, Sage gives Violet a languid grin. "We're going on a hike. Come on, coward, don't look like that."

—BAD IDEA; YOU HAVE NO BEARINGS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WOODS—

"These are new shoes."

"Since when did you give a shit?" Sage snorts, pulling a face and picking up a motley-coloured knitted rucksack from the motley-coloured floor at the foot of her bed. She slings it over her shoulder. "The Violet I knew would step in mud if it could fill a kiddie pool in the summer."

Stone-faced and unimpressed, Violet plucks her own skateboard off the ground, shaking off a knitted sweater that'd latched onto her trucks. It's true. Even if her Vans were new, a little dirt caked on the suede wouldn't have bothered her. At the very most, she'd just send them for dry-cleaning, pay a little extra to get them back early. Violet doesn't know why she'd said it. A bad feeling had crept into her gut and poisoned her veins with a paranoia that couldn't have come from nothing.

—GO HOME, DO NOT FOLLOW—

But Violet's had enough of being told what to do. Since when has she minded rules except her own?

Moments later, Violet is untangling a low-hanging branch from Sage's rucksack. Out in the middle of the woods, nowhere stretches for miles of green and bark and screaming crickets. They've hiked deep enough for the paranoia to overcome the vice-like suppression she's clamped over her nerves. Tugging the sleeves of her thick Thrasher sweater down to her knuckles from where they'd slipped just below her wrist, just letting the little scars marring her pale flesh in a hundred little tally marks peek out into the open, Violet surveys her surroundings, eyes sharp and trained on every moving shadow, every odd rustle of leaves.

—MOVE DO NOT STAY STILL YOU MUST MOVE—

"This way," Sage says, battered sneakers crunching through piles of dried leaves. They'd gone off a trailblazer, navigating by pure memory on Sage's part.

After a couple minutes more of stomping through the thicket of underbrush and low-hanging branches looking to decapitate them, Sage stops between three trees, marked with red yarn tied to their lowest branches, and around their barks like place markers.

"This," Sage declares, dropping her backpack and skateboard on the ground, "is my office."

A sizeable cluster of skinny but healthy marijuana plants sway in the breeze that circles through the woods. Sage flops onto the ground, dead leaves crunching like bones under her weight. Violet follows, plucking a cigarette from her pocket and lighting it. She takes a drag and sighs out a nebula of smoke. She offers Sage a cigarette.

"Thanks," Sage says, accepting the white stick, and lets Violet light it for her. Then, she pins Violet with a soul-searing look, eyes flashing with warning. "Now that we're here, you cannot bring anyone else. This is top-secret, confidential stuff. I'm not kidding. If you tell anyone about this place, I could get into serious trouble. But since you're a friend, you have special privileges. Only you and Kit know about this plantation. I trust you won't violate it."

If it were anyone else, Violet might've extorted this secret as ammunition. That's how the world worked. People were users, and if you didn't want to be used, use them first. But since this was Sage, whose home was her home, whose hands were made for comfort, whose words could bite but held nothing except truth.

"I'm offended you even have to tell me that," Violet deadpanned.

"Just making sure," Sage said, smiling as she roots through her backpack and pulls out two pairs of latex gloves. "Here, wear this so the THC doesn't stick to your hands. I'm known around here as a good pot dealer, don't mess this up for me."

Putting on her gloves, Violet smirks. "And since when did you earn that reputation?"

"Since I started, bitch." Sage puffs with pride as she pulls on her own gloves and wiggles her fingers. She plucks the leaves off her plants and deposits them in a plastic ziplock baggie. "I started growing and selling my own weed, like, two years ago. Started two years ago, and been going strong since. I got a lot of regular clients. They put in their requests in my locker, and I deliver it to their door."

Violet fixes Sage with a blank stare. "If they do checks, you're busted."

"What do you take me for? An idiot? I don't stash my weed in my locker. That's just where people fill in a form and deposit their cash. I mean, with the amount of shit going around now, business is booming."

Spine stiffening, Violet perks up. "What kind of shit?"

Even though the weed plantation is too far from the usual hiking trails for there to be no one within the vicinity, Sage casts a furtive glance around the woods for prying eyes and ears. "I don't know what, exactly, but everyone at the Rez seems to be so on-edge lately. Like, a couple years back, this really family moved into Forks, and I don't know much about them, but I know they're freaking Paul's gang out. Kit wouldn't talk about it, but something bigger than us is on the fucking horizon. Last year, this girl moved to Forks and got involved with that family. Ever since then, Kit and the boys have been more tense."

"I've been wondering what Kit's hiding from us," Violet says, mind racing, searching for loose ends to tie together, for theories with no source, for questions answered by echoes. "She's still Kit but there's something different about her. She's not telling us everything about Sam's cult and all. It's getting annoying."

"You'd think she'd be the last one out of the three of us to join a cult," Sage snorted. "I mean, you wouldn't join a cult if it didn't benefit you in some way, plus you hate, like, ninety-nine percent of the human population. I'd join a cult in a heartbeat if it gave me free stuff—"

"That is not how a cult works." Amusement flits across Violet's features, and her lips curl into something almost resembling a smile. "You're thinking of a charity."

"I might as well be," Sage snorts. There's something melancholic in her chest, something weighing on her shoulders.

You don't have to be Atlas, Violet wants to tell her, your shoulders were meant to be free, your back is mine. Instead, she says: "I don't read code."

Sage purses her lips. "My economics teacher says that if I keep my grades up, I might be eligible for NYU stern. Business school."

Violet lifts a brow. "I wasn't aware you were into business."

Sage shrugs. "I don't wanna sell weed forever, man. I mean, this shit's fun, but it's all just going to my college fund since my parents can't exactly pay all of it. Plus, business school sounds fun, I'm getting straight A's, my GPA's decent enough, even though my Chemistry grade might take some work. Kit's helping me with that, though."

Violet's mind flew back to years ago, when she'd tried her first ecstasy pill with Livvy back in California. She'd stumbled out of the house party, suddenly feeling too claustrophobic in a room filled with pulsing strobe-lights and sweat-shiny bodies throwing shattered colours and shadows that seemed to grow darker and darker by the minute. She'd sat down on the curb outside in the dewy Spring air, the night frigid with smog and too little stars. Behind her, the music pulsed, a low bass thrum that pounded into the concrete. She could feel it in her bones, the whole world tilting on its axis. Her head had gone oblivion, but her nerves were on fire. For once, the iron voice had silenced itself the second the pill had broken down in her bloodstream.

Staring up at the night sky, she must've been too out-of-it to notice the homeless man sitting a couple meters away from her on the same curb. Elbows propped up on her knees, she heaved a sigh so heavy it felt like her organs might fly out of her mouth and splatter against the night sky, all blood and dark matter.

Party too hard? the homeless man had asked. What's your poison?

She looked over at him, not immediately realising the danger she might've been in. Predators look for vulnerable prey. Predators might chase after an entire herd, but it's the ones that get separated from the group that they pounce on. Here she was, alone at night, albeit, only down the lawn from some football player's house, but there's no one outside to hear her screams. If she could even process the entire ordeal enough to make a sound.

Life, she'd said, thinking too much about Luka and the ghosts she had tucked away in the back of her skull. Luka, gone. Wren, too far away. Mom, not an option, Sage and Kit, she didn't want to think about. Dad...

Ah, the man had laughed, displaying a mouth full of yellow teeth and laugh lines wrinkling his old face like creased newspaper. That'll kill you. Slowly. It's the drugs that speed the process up.

Well, isn't someone a Sherlock Holmes here, Violet had drawled, digging her fingernails into the concrete. So, what fucked you over and ditched you on the side of the road? Let me guess. Heroin? Lost your job, couldn't start over because you were too deep in your wallowing to climb back out the existential pit? Which will it be?

The man smiled. Life. He'd given her answer back to her. He lifted his chin at her. And I know a high when I see one. The man's eyes flickered to the sky. Smart girl like you, why'd you wanna throw it all away on drugs that'll fuck your head?

Violet's smile was chilling, but she said nothing because a response would only be a waste of breath, anyway. Everything inside her was wasted potential. She used to get good grades, and now she didn't care. She used to want to make something of herself, make her father proud. Now she cared so little about his approval, she would lower herself into the dirt rather than listen to anything he had to say.

But Sage is not Violet. Sage has potential. Sage has direction. Violet has vengeance.

"I know people," Violet says, taking a clump of leaves from Sage's palm and stuffing them into a plastic bag, "if you want—"

"Thanks," Sage says, busying herself with a plant, "but I want to do this by myself."

And that was that.

☾

AT SEVEN ON THE DOT, the sound of Violet's skateboard wheels grinding hot against the gravel, leaving behind a trailblazer of new scratches on the driveway, tears through the quiet evening. Violet spots her father's sleek black car parked in front of the garage beside Aaron's. Aaron leans against his car, smoking a cigarette. Across the stretch of tarmac and the little cupid fountain sitting in the centre of the round-about, Aaron throws Violet a little wave, and blows smoke at the sky.

At dinner, Violet wonders if the reason why her father can barely stand to look at her anymore is because she's a reminder of everything he's lost, or if it's truly because she's diabolical. She hopes it's the latter. The first sounds pathetic. The mental image she's constructed of her father—this symbol of power, of clean suits, all angles and sure, purposeful strides and sharp eyes that close in on weaknesses—would fall apart if it were true.

"Kit's having a sleepover tomorrow," Kit says, picking at the peas on her plate. It's the first words either have spoken since they'd sat down for dinner, with only the scrapes of their forks and knives against their plates and the muffled noises of the cleaners and the cooks going about their business around the house to fill the tense silence. Her father doesn't look up at her, but she knows she's caught his attention as his fork hovers over his steak for the briefest moment. So she presses on. "It's a Saturday."

"Are you asking for permission?"

"Yes."

"That didn't sound like a question." He continues cutting up his steak.

Suppressing the indignant rage that strokes her core, Violet plasters on an icy smile and asks, "Kit's having a sleepover on Saturday night. Her mother will be home. May I go?"

"Fine," her father says, finally, after a stretch of pensive silence. "But only if you give your little sister a call tonight. Your mother called earlier, and Wren wanted to speak with you, but you weren't home."

It's not that much of a compromise, really. Violet hasn't spoken to Wren in person (writing letters and exchanging emails doesn't count) in years. As strained as their relationship might be, there isn't much of a problem they have with each other as much as the people around them.

"Mom's driving me crazy," Wren tells Violet, when Violet's locked her bedroom door, thrown the windows wide open and leans against the sill with a cigarette clamped between her teeth. Wren knows nothing about the cigarette, of course, but the way Violet's cellphone burns a heavy heat against her right ear makes it seem like Wren's judgement is boring into her skin. "She keeps cleaning the house over and over again, trying to get rid of dust that isn't there. Yesterday she asked me if the floor was sandy. Thrice."

   "Typical hypochondriac," Violet drawls, smoke slipping in and out of her mouth with every little breath she takes. The night smells of rain and cigarette smoke. Above, the sky is all pitch and stars tangled in the clouds. "Don't let the stress bother you. With people like her, you'll do better just telling her what she wants to hear. No point arguing. Don't waste your breath."

"I can't," Wren sighs. "She's already been through so much, and you know mom. She's sensitive. She's not like you or dad. You both act like you could take over the world whenever you choose to. She gets so affected by the littlest things, it's... I don't know. Sometimes we say the wrong things to each other and she'll just break. I feel bad."

"Your empathy will kill you."

Over the invisible phone lines spanning over an ocean, Violet feels Wren's flinch. It's silent for a moment, the way things always are with two people who don't have anything to say to each other besides the skeletons in their closet, which are too heavy to hang out to dry.

"I wish Luka were still here," Wren says, her voice a tiny, fragile thing. "I wish we still had our family. I wish I wasn't in London, and I wish mom would stop worrying about me."

It's then that Violet realises that she still hasn't asked Wren how she was holding up. After Luka's funeral, Violet hadn't seen much of Wren. Actually, she hadn't seen much of anybody after that whole incident. Back then, Wren was too small to be able to understand, and they'd hardly ever interacted besides the times Violet had to babysit Wren while the babysitter wasn't available (at the time, Wren was more hindrance than sibling), so Violet didn't waste her energy trying to connect with her. In retrospect, maybe she should've spoken to her sister. They'd both lost their older brother. They'd both lost their parents in the process. Worst of all, they were on the brink of losing each other. Violet still doesn't know how Wren feels about the entire ordeal. It's about time she asked.

"Dad sends me to therapy," Violet says, "I don't hate it, and Dr Paige doesn't judge. Does anyone look out for you?"

Wren's breath stalls. "I don't need looking after. I'm fine, honestly. It's just mom and me out here. Mom still gets upset when I try to talk about what happened, but I have friends, and we do talk about this stuff—"

"That's not what I meant." Violet flicks cherry ash from the glowing tip of her cigarette. They drift down into the darkness under her window, lost to the shadows. "You were young, but not so young that you couldn't understand what happened. And you're not stupid either. Say it like how it is. Don't lie to my face."

A beat passes.

"I just..." Wren grapples for her words. They're right there, but she can't seem to build the right bridges to get to them. "I can't help but feel like the universe cheated Luka. And cheated us all."

Before Luka vanished, before her father buried his empty casket and then buried Violet—not in the ground, but in California. miles away from home; in St. Xavier's, in Dalton Prep, in Walcott, in Colton Academy, St. Agnes, and in Verity Prep—Violet would've told Wren that the universe is all existing matter and space and billions of years of light and darkness. No particle or gravity-vacuum has the power to cheat a person of anything. But now, Violet says, "yeah, it sure did," and blows smoke at the stars. The moon hangs in the sky, small and yellow and gibbous, and all of a sudden Violet feels like it's too cramped, here in Forks. Small towns suffocate. She misses Sage's house. All that open space and ocean.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
so jacob and bella make their cameos!!!! no paul here but he'll come up next chapter ;)