The stairs creaked under his weight, third step from the top—he knew each one by heart now, knew exactly where to step to avoid the loud ones. He'd learned that weeks ago, when she'd first stopped coming down.

Her door was closed.

Ten seconds passed.

He opened the door.

She was there. Of course she was there. Exactly where she'd been every time he'd come up here for the past month. Same spot in the middle of the bed, knees pulled up to her chest, one of Eddie's old band tees hanging off her shoulders like a shroud. The sleeves were too long—they always had been. She used to push them up to her elbows, laugh about how Eddie's arms were so much bigger than hers.

Now they just swallowed her wrists.

Light filtered through the blinds in thin, dusty stripes, catching on the posters and polaroids still taped to the wall—Eddie's lopsided grin, his middle finger up at the camera, the two of them tangled together in his van, her head thrown back mid-laugh. Dustin tried not to look at them. He always tried. He always failed.

She didn't move.

Not her head. Not her shoulders. Not even her eyes. She was looking down at her hands, and it took Dustin a second too long to realize she was holding something.

He stepped closer. Slow. Careful. Like she was a deer in the woods, like the wrong sound might send her scattering into the trees where he couldn't follow.

It was a guitar pick.

Black. Worn at the edges. The little logo faded to almost nothing from years of Eddie's thumb rubbing over it while he played.

She was turning it over and over between her fingers. Slow. Steady. Like a rosary. Like a prayer she couldn't speak out loud.

The pick kept turning.

Dustin's heart slammed against his ribs. He leaned forward, hope a sharp, painful thing in his chest—

And then her shoulders shifted, just barely, and she turned the pick over again.

She didn't look at him. She didn't speak.

Just kept tracing the edges, over and over, like it was the only thing holding her together. Like if she stopped, she might slip somewhere he couldn't reach her.

Dustin stood in the doorway, the cookies cooling in his hand, and felt something inside him crack.

He didn't say it out loud. He couldn't. But he thought it—thought it so loud it seemed to fill the whole room.

She's not coming back. She's not coming back. She's not—

He backed out of the room, pulled the door shut behind him—

—and heard, faintly, through the wood:

The soft, repeated scrape of a guitar pick against skin. Over and over. Over and over.