When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

The soft scent of grass, sweat, and bonfire hung around his denim jacket, weeks of skateboarding and filming and nights around the fire pit distilled into the smell that would always mean Remy Nakamura to me.

Explosive, dangerous, overwhelming. I also craved it, wanted to hear it again as soon as it faded, wished I knew how to pick it apart so I could understand what it meant.

“Remember, Fran, it’s not the size of something that matters in this galaxy. It’s the gravity of a thing, how much it pulls on things and where it takes them. You’ve got gravity out the wazoo.”

“I don’t believe there’s a reason all those bad things happened,” I whispered, forcing my gaze up to Wayne. “The accident, or your daughter’s death. Sometimes shit just happens. Horrible, cosmic-level shit. “But maybe sometimes things do happen for a reason too. In the gaps between all that. Like maybe the world tries to repair itself, to heal or just, like, adapt. What happened wasn’t your fault. A million different things had to go just wrong for that accident to happen, and I don’t have a good reason it worked that way. But a million different things had to happen just right for us to be here right now too. For me to be standing next to this”—my voice broke—“piece of Mark. For us to have him back for even one minute. And that’s . . .” I searched for a word that would capture it, that even stood a chance at gesturing toward the enormity of it all. “Extraordinary,” Arthur whispered.

Not ghosts. Not too much, too needy, too in the way, too selfish, not too afraid. Just kids. Kids, pretending to be okay in a world that wasn’t.

How many billions of things had to happen just right to give me this ordinary life.

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.