“Hurts…,” he managed, licking his dry, cracked lips.

“No, no, please don’t…,” she murmured as she tugged his tuxedo jacket open as gently as she could.

What she saw made her throat close with fear. It was too much. There was too much damage. The wound was open and black and glistening in the moonlight, so much blood draining into the cold, dry earth.

Her hands flew to the wound, her fingers working quickly to find the edges of the gash, the words coming to her lips even before she realized she’d made a decision.

But he spoke first. “I… I love…”

His voice was so weak she almost missed it, but comprehension flickered in his beautiful brown eyes, and he looked at her the way he did when he picked her up for school, the way he had the first time she’d passed in front of his locker last year, the way he did when he searched the crowd for her face after every play at football games.

It was a look that saw her, knew her, really knew her, the way her mother never would and her father, whoever he was, never chose to. It was the look she’d hung every dream, every foolish hope on, and as he blinked twice, his eyes rolling up and going opaque, she said the words.

She said the words the way her grandmother had taught her, the syllables slipping like gossamer ribbons past her lips, words she’d chanted a hundred times on a hundred long-ago nights lit by sputtering candles and her grandmother’s eyes bright with purpose. A hundred times, a hundred nights, but tonight was the first time she prayed with all her soul that the words would work.

A twitch, a sigh-she broke off in the middle of a word whose sound was burned into her memory, but whose meaning she didn’t really know, not the way her grandmother did. Her boyfriend twitched again and blinked, and she stilled her fingers on his face.