Connor probably spent three hours looking for Evan.
He'd started at the other boy's house, and when no one answered, he'd figured Evan hadn't come home and spent he next three hours alternating between looking around town and Evan's house.
Eventually he decided that Evan didn't want to be found, and he just sat on Evan's porch.
His pocket buzzed, and he pulled Evan's phone out, flipping it open to see that it was at five percent.
He smiled at the background, which was a slightly blurry picture of a tree in the middle of a field.
He knew that tree.
It was the one at the orchard he'd gone to as a kid, the one him and Zoe had scared their parents half to death with how high they'd gone.
His eyes stung with tears at the memory, and he blinked them away quickly, closing the phone abruptly and shoving it back into his pocket.
He stood up and stretched, deciding to just go home.
He'd left the door unlocked, and It was unlikely that his mother or father had locked it, especially considering where they lived.
He slipped inside quietly, shutting the door softly and creeping up the stairs.
The floor creaked as he passed Zoe's room, and he paused, taking in the bright and glittery stickers that she'd stuck on her door as a child.
His father had hated them, and made her take them off whenever she put them on, sometimes making her stay up late into he night picking them off, but they always somehow managed to reappear within a couple of days, something that Zoe always denied fault for.
Connor reached for the doorknob and turned it, opening the door hesitantly, as if she were in there and would yell at him for not knocking, but when he turned the light on, he saw no one.
He stepped inside, shutting the door behind him and taking a look around.
He could count the number of times he'd been in here since he was twelve on one hand, but the room hadn't changed much, aside from the blankets on the bed and the posters on the wall.
The walls were still the gross shade of pink that his sister had picked out when their mother had told her to pick a shade of pink, a color that she hadn't disliked until that day, but after that she'd hated it with a passion, erasing it from everything she could.
He understood that.
He'd picked the darkest shade of blue he could find when he'd been told to pick a shade of blue, and had done his best to dislike the color as well.
That was something they'd had in common.
He walked around her room, his fingers brushing over her things as if he could find her in these things.
He went through old boxes in her closet, smiling at the things he found, like her tshirt for the year she'd joined jazz band.
He took out her guitar and strummed it softly, remembering how well she'd played it.
He was about to leave when he saw the piece of paper laying on her desk, stark white against the brown wood.
He picked it up, reading over it slowly and taking every word in.
She knew they'd find her with the letter, and was smart enough to know they'd think it was hers.
Even though she hadn't actually written a note, she'd used these words as her goodbye, and that was something.
He held the letter to his chest, closing his arms tightly around himself.
Letting out a shaky breath, he fell into her bed and curled into a ball and, surrounded by the memories of his sister and her life, fell asleep.