Her smile grew devious. “I know how to get what I want. He wasn’t budging so I threatened.”

I paused for a minute, looked away from the screen and fiddled with some things on my desk. “How is he?”

She knew I wasn’t asking about Heath.

She nodded. “He’s fine. He’s his typical grim, intense self.”

I laughed. “He’s not always that way.”

She gave me a weird look. “Fallen has been intense for as long as I’ve known him. I just never knew why until now. But now that I know his real self, it’s understandable. He’s just that type of guy.” She threw me a mischievous look. “It’s a good thing he’s so pretty to make up for it.”

I rolled my eyes and then laughed, quickly changing the subject. She groused about my lack of playing time and I didn’t want to tell her that the thought of playing the game right now was a little too painful…between all that was—or wasn’t—going on between Adam and me and the increasing conflict I was feeling over blogging on the subject of the secret quest, I felt torn about DE. I missed it but I knew I needed a break from it as well.

Every day, I hiked to my special spot up on the valley rim near my mom’s house. I would arrive just at sunset, when the early summer evenings were painted in oranges and deep, deep purple. Where the heat of the sunbaked rocks seeped through my clothing, where the dry smells of white desert sage and the sound of cricket chirps assailed my senses.

I took this time to close my eyes, to think, to breathe in the ways that Dr. Marbrow had showed me. I focused on color and light and tried to think about all that I had to be thankful for. I’d seen a lot of heartache in my short twenty-three years of life, but the things I’d done, the places I’d been, the people I’d known. The love I’d felt…

All those had made the pain worth it. And just a little bit more each day, I began to realize that.

On one of my last nights in Anza, I was outside at night enjoying the darkness and the primal beauty of the dome of stars above my head. There were few night lights up here and no light pollution, unlike down on the coast around the big cities.

Like every other evening, I found my eyes wandering up toward the constellation Draco while fingering the ever-present compass around my neck. It’s always there, he’d said, no matter what time of night, no matter what season.

I was now familiar with the main points in this long, snake-like configuration of stars. My eyes traced the outline of it in the sky. True north. What was that? How could I find the direction? I thought of the figurines William had made for me, the Guide, like a compass, to show me the way in troubled times.

If these weren’t troubled times, I didn’t know what were. I stared long and hard at those stars, fixed right between the Big and Little Dippers. And after a long stretch of nothing but the quiet sounds of night in my ears, a streak of fire appeared from nowhere and cut its way directly across Draco.

Wish on a falling star. It had been noted in that now dubious bucket list that I’d wanted to wish on a falling star. I’d seen a lot of them, growing up here, but had never had the occasion to have a wish that I’d wanted so much I’d wish it on a meteor.

But tonight I did. I closed my eyes and pictured my arms around Adam, his arms around me. I wished us together. I wished us happy. I wished us strong enough to fight our way through our own messed-up emotions and doubtful thoughts to be together again. Each beat of my heart thrummed through my chest and it hurt. I swallowed and instead of suppressing the tears, I let them flow down my cheeks. There was no one here to reprimand me, no one here for me to reprimand. There was no reason to keep the tears at bay.

It felt good to let them out. But they weren’t just tears of sadness or loss, tears of loneliness; they were also tears of gratitude. I silently thanked the Universe for all that I had to be thankful for: my health, my future, the fact that I had known true love. It didn’t matter what the future held, because those short moments of love that I’d experienced had taught me that, thorns and all, life was worth it. And that for me, happiness was a choice.

And that night, my face wet, my eyes sore, my heart full, I made that choice.

***

I maintained the blog, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I’d already resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to continue it. With Adam and me together, the blog was going to come between us eventually. Either I’d solve the quest and feel obligated to pass those clues on to the readership, or Draco Multimedia would implement some game change that would irk me and I’d need to rant about it. Or…and my stomach dropped to contemplate that possibility…Adam and I would have broken up and it would hurt too much to continue playing Dragon Epoch.