My stomach dropped as I watched the screen. Persephone, her character, gated out of the dungeon at a critical moment where there were a bunch of goblins—too many for us to handle, really—attacking our characters. She was our healer and we had no way, except for my crappy heal spells, to survive.

In seconds, our characters were dead, hovering as ghosts in the graveyard. Heath heaved a long sigh. “Well, that was excellent timing,” he muttered between coughs.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I had no idea she’d take it that hard.”

“Mia, I love you but sometimes you are just fucking clueless,” Heath said.

I glanced up at Adam, whose jaw had set at Heath’s words. But he didn’t say anything. I couldn’t tell whether he was agreeing with Heath or preparing to go to battle for me. Instead, he said nothing.

“I know,” I agreed. “Maybe I just need to grow up.”

“Doll, there isn’t a person alive who loves you more than I do. And I don’t want you to be down on yourself. I will talk to her. She’ll be okay. Just keep your strength up. I wish I could be with you tomorrow. But it’s round three. Only nine more to go after that.”

I fell back against my pillow, tears prickling my eyes. Only nine more rounds of sheer and utter hell. Yay.

We logged off and Adam sat beside me for a long time.

Finally, I got the courage to ask him the burning question on my mind all day. “So this afternoon, when I was sitting on your lap…did you not like that?”

He didn’t answer for a few long, heavy minutes. Then, he cleared his throat. “I liked that. A little too much, probably.”

I blinked. That made me feel a little bit better. “You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

He shifted next to me so he could look into my face. “We’re supposed to be going slow, remember?”

“That was your idea, not mine.”

Another beat of silence. “True.”

“So…how slow is ‘slow’?’”

He took a deep breath and let it out. “Maybe we could play it by ear…”

“So does this mean like… no kissing, no good groping, no making out?”

He appeared very uncomfortable. “Let’s…play it by ear?” he repeated.

I sighed heavily and he smoothed his hand across my bare head, my cheek. I drifted off to sleep but felt his kiss against my smooth scalp before he got up to leave me.

Heath was right. I was fucking clueless. And now that I was becoming self-aware, it seemed I had no idea how to get myself out of these pits I’d dug myself into. I found myself needing the people around me more than ever and yet because of my own actions, they were more distant. Mia Strong was an island, all right. But she was fucking lonely and dying to have someone save her from her solitude.

I dreamt of William’s figurines. They were life-sized and animated, yet still made of metal. They could only speak to me in the quietest of whispers yet it seemed they all spoke at once and I couldn’t hear them over the roaring wind and storm all around me. But I knew—I just knew that they had important things to tell me. Vital things. Things I needed to know for my own survival. But I couldn’t hear.

I woke up at two a.m. sticky with sweat and burning up. My mouth was dry, my pajamas were soaked and I had a headache as big as the mansion I now lived in. Stumbling out of bed, I went to splash cold water on my face and all over my head, soaking my T-shirt and yoga pants even more.

It was damn unfair that my last night of freedom before more chemo was being ruined by this taste of menopause. I really needed that reminder that I was now as barren and lifeless inside as the moon. And probably as inviting, as my rejected advances toward Adam had indicated.

I stumbled from the bathroom, now completely wet, and peeled off my clothes, grabbing a thin tank top and pajama pants. But I felt stifled, suffocating in the still air of my room. And I still had no idea how to open my new, fancy windows.

Plus I had no desire to go back and toss in my bed for hours, thinking about the certain doom that would be injected into my veins in a matter of hours. The night before each round of chemo was a lot like how I imagined it must feel for an ex-inmate anticipating his next incarceration. He knew exactly what hell was in store for him and he also knew that he was powerless to avoid it once the jury declared, “Guilty on all counts.”

The IV injection would feel like the cold weight of manacles around my wrists and ankles. The almost instant metallic taste in my mouth and dull headache would be the sounds of the jail door clanking shut, locking me in for days.