We got out the car, trudging up the stairs to the front door so I could swipe us in. Once inside, I let Tyler take the lead. I followed him up the stairs, bypassing the third floor where I lived, and continuing up to the sixth.

When we reached the last landing and he went up the final staircase which ended in a gated, metal door, I watched in confusion as he slipped a hand through the gap and flipped the latch from the inside.

"It looks locked from the outside, but we figured out how to get up to the roof," he explained, pushing the door wide. I slipped through and heard him relock it behind us. To our left was a metal ladder.

"After you," he said, sweeping his arm out.

I grabbed the sides of the ladder, the cold metal biting into my already frozen hands, and hauled myself up. Twenty rungs later, I shoved open a trap-door and popped my head up into the bitter night air. Pulling myself over the edge, I stepped out onto the graveled roof.

Above us the moon hung fat and lazy in the sky, a cloudy silver coin. It was a clear night, a million stars glittering overhead like tiny fireflies stuck in velvet blanket. The roof was quartered off only by a two foot ledge. Below, the campus spread out like a tapestry, a mosaic of neatly placed brick buildings and walkways speckled with hazy golden lamps.

I preferred the beautiful chaotic mess of stars above.

"It's beautiful," I whispered, afraid I would shatter it.

"At first, my friends and I found it because we were being drunken assholes, but then...I used to come up here whenever I needed to look at things a little differently."

I walked right up to the ledge and peered down. The ground seemed a long way off, glittering with the beginnings of frost, as though the stars above had rubbed against each other and shed their skins. The wind was stronger up here, buffeting me from behind, pushing me closer to the edge as though daring me to fly. I took a step back.

"Thank you," I said, turning to Tyler. "For showing me this. For sticking around."

In the moonlight, I saw the corners of Tyler's mouth lift in a small, sad smile.

'"Is something wrong?" I asked, the gravel crunching under my boots as I closed the gap between us. I reached out to touch the corner of his mouth with my fingertip. He pressed my hand to his cheek so I could feel the warmth of his skin and the tickle of stubble against my palm. Then he brought it down to his side, and let go.

"Dash, there is something I need to tell you." An owl hooted mournfully in the distance. "It's about Mia."

The way he said her name so carefully, like it was wrapped in barbed wire that would cut his tongue, made me tense up. Everything seemed to constrict inside me, as though the cold air had solidified and formed a tight tube casing around me.

"She didn't die in an accident—not the way you think."

He tripped over the word 'accident.' A hand went to the back of his neck, tugged on his collar.

I swallowed, tasting metal, and forced myself to ask the question. "How did she die?"

"She killed herself."

My mind had already been coalescing around the word "suicide" when he said the words, but they still hit me hard in the stomach. I walked away, the gravel slipping and sliding under my shoes, threatening to send me sprawling, trying to give myself time to think. Suicide. The word was slippery and sharp, coiled like a snake poised to bite. It had a much heavier weight to it than the word death.

It felt almost like some part of me had known, when he had first told me that she died in an accident and couldn't seem to get the words out; the way I had equated "accident" with "car crash" when he didn't explain what kind of accident; the way it was still wedged between his family like a serrated knife, catching on the edges that still stuck out—because suicide wasn't a clean cut for those left behind.

"Why did you tell me it was an accident?" I directed the question towards campus, letting the words be ripped from my lips on the wind, almost hoping he couldn't hear me so I wouldn't have to hear the answer.

"I've always thought of it as an accident—it never should have happened," he said from behind me. The pain in his voice was enough to make my eyes prickle with tears, but I wasn't entirely sure what I was crying about. I wrapped my arms around my torso. It still felt like I had been punched in the gut.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Part of me wanted to yell at him for lying, for not telling me the whole story, but my thoughts and emotions had been wrenched and pulled and broken some many times in the last two hours, it was all I could do just to keep forming sentences.

"The same reason you only told me about Danny in pieces," he said, drawing level with me.

I bit my lip, hoping to drive away the tears, and turned to look at him. It may have been the angle of the moonlight, or the strands of hair blowing across my face, but I could've sworn his eyes were glassing over too. My hand twitched as though to reach out to him, but I kept it firmly pinned against my body. If I reached out to him now, I would have to pass through Mia's ghost first and I was afraid she would latch onto me and never let go.

"Why did she do it?" I asked softly, searching his face.

Tyler spread his hands helplessly. "Why does anyone do it? She didn't think her life was worth living anymore."

His words stirred something deep in my memory. Philosophy class—the first day we met—when we were talking about physician-assisted suicide. He had pressed the issue to the point where I was speechless, dragged down into the memories of my own brushes with death. But, the more pieces of that conversation I reluctantly pulled forward, the more I realized something.

"That day in class," I said slowly. "You were arguing that people who were depressed should have the right to end their life..." I was trying to pick my words carefully, like I was putting together a puzzle and I only had one shot to pick all the pieces in the right order.

Now that he had told me what really happened, I couldn't seem to stop. Even as all the cells in my body shied away from Mia and everything to do with her, part of me needed to know her story, all of it, so that it wouldn't haunt me the way it haunted him.

Tyler shook his head, his blonde hair tipped silver in the pale starlight. "I didn't agree with it. I was just playing devil's advocate—it's how I try to understand why she did it—why she would think that she was out of options."

"How?" I croaked.

Tyler flinched and I was afraid I had gone too far, afraid that I was asking him to give too much of her up. He looked away, out over campus where everything was quiet and still and dark. He took a deep breath and said, "She jumped."

I closed my eyes, felt myself swaying as my body adjusted its balance to the loss of sight, compensating for the wind that was only growing stronger. Hearing him say those words, knowing we were on a roof six stories above the ground, made me feel dizzy and breathless and suddenly, all I could picture was toppling over the ledge and watching as the ground rushed up to meet me.

Tyler placed a hand on each of my shoulders, and I sucked in my breath hard as I opened my eyes. His eyes were the color of the gray starlight surrounding us, vast and fluid and soft and sharp all at once. The slightest touch of red tinted his face from the cold. His face was only a few inches from mine.

"I didn't want to tell you this to add to your pain or drive you away. I wanted to tell you because you deserved to know the truth, and I wanted you to hear it from me."

"I understand," I said. He dropped his hands from my shoulders and took my hands instead; they were much warmer than mine.

"Mia will always be a part of me, just like Danny will always be a part of you. But she's gone and I've let her go." He placed a hand gently under my chin, his warm fingers grasping my jaw. "You're the one who's here now."

I forced a smile, my lips cracking in the cold, but inside I was still reeling. As much as I wanted them to, his words didn't make me happy. They didn't ease the wretched feeling that had settled in my chest when he first said he had something to tell me. Maybe tomorrow, in the daylight, I would be able to look at it differently. But not at this moment. Because Mia was dead and the word suicide was still flickering in the back of my mind like a broken neon sign.

Tyler and I retraced our steps through the trapdoor, down the ladder and stairs, to the third floor landing. He said goodnight and kissed my cheek, and I could tell by the way he searched my face and kept looking over his shoulder that he knew I wasn't as fine as I pretended to be.

Once he had disappeared, I opened the door to my room quietly. It was dark, and I could just make out the sound of Amber's light breathing. I slipped off my boots and placed them in my closet. Then, I tiptoed over to my bed and rummaged underneath for a bottle of wine.

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All right, so what do you guys think? Again, I know this is a really heavy  and difficult topic, and I really wanted to get the emotion of the whole scene right.

I would sincerely appreciate any feedback you guys could give. Is it too much with everything going on? How do you think Tyler/Dash handled the conversation? Did you see this coming?

Looking forward to what you guys think. Thanks for reading!