“Please don’t go, Evelyn.”

“I have to.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I worked for this.”

He looked at me as if I had told him the sky was optional.

“What about us?”

I was seventeen.

I did not know how to say:

I love you and I still need to leave.

So I said the harsher thing.

“If we are meant to survive this, we will.”

Thomas’s face changed.

“That’s what people say when they already know they’re leaving.”

I started crying.