I understand why they wanted me to see this. The video they made on Joshua’s seventeenth birthday. It’s absolutely precious to me, as I’m sure it’s precious to all of them. The last few hours before all of this misery happened.

On the screen, they’ve set up a poker table. They’re not betting, they’re just playing for the fun of playing. Joshua wins the last hand of the night, by two pairs, since everybody else was bluffing. I have to pause the video.

“I miss him.”

“Us, too,” DK says.

“I promised him I’d try to be happy, but…”

“You have to try, if you promised,” Wonwoo tells me. Neither of them sit here with halos. They handed their wings in the day Joshua died, and turned around to live mortal human lives. I don’t blame them. Not one bit.

“We just wanted you to have this,” Jihoon chimes in. “None of us will ever get to see him again, but we all know what you meant to him. And we all know he would have wanted us to be your friends. So as long as you’re still human, and as long as you love him, we’ll be here, but you have to keep trying.”

I can’t help the tears. They roll so freely at the thought of what he did for me. They rolled when I said goodbye to the body in the casket, they rolled when I sang Can I Lay By Your Side by his grave, and they roll every time I think of his voice, his warmth, his smile.

What Joshua did for me was unimaginable. I didn’t think I’d ever be so loved, ever.

I just nod. “He