I find it kind of strange that no reporter ever asks me if Jack and I were really married. I guess they're not even giving me the opportunity to foolishly go down that same road?

I never wear my wedding ring in the Capitol. I barely ever wear it at home (just sometimes I want to remember). I keep it in the drawer of my nightstand. I get a little frame for the picture of us that he mailed me and set it up there beside my bed. Not that anyone aside from Faline or Papa ever enters my bedroom, but if they do, unlike the wedding snapshots, it's innocuous. It's probably the truest to us anyway. I look at the two of us smiling there and wonder about a million things that have no answers.

For all that Jack was such a fixture in the Capitol and within the Games programming, his death is, I think, treated with less fanfare than Silk's. That she could die like that and the larger body of Games-related affairs could move proved, maybe, that any of us could be expendable.

Maybe it's because Jack came before all the rest of us, but we other victors aren't called upon to talk about him for anything official. A few- Hector, Kayta, Shy- share reminiscences via secondary channels.

There is a small Capitol memorial ceremony for him though and we're all dug up for it. He was cremated, Capitol style. I wonder, vaguely, whatever happened to his wedding ring. I carry mine with me to the ceremony in my pocket. At first it feels so strange and distant and unreal that I am stiff and silent, but when we are all milling about the reception afterward, I don't know- something hits home somehow? I'm not sure. I cry hysterically and find myself hiding away in a corner of the fancy garden rented out for the event.

Everyone knows where I am though. Most of them talk to me anyway.

I find out that the medication that killed Jack was the same one that made Emmy sick during the Fourteenth Games. Someone else tells me his replacement teeth were made of material so strong that they were left behind from the cremation when every other bone was down to fragments. I don't know whether or not I want to hear these hideous things, but I can't pull myself together to tell anyone to stop, so I hear them anyway.

Sophie Varen, the only district citizen who is not a victor present, tells me that there are some people- romantics, I guess- who say that it was a broken heart that killed him. That he was forced to leave me and so he couldn't take any more.

I want to believe that what happened to Jack was, like what happened to Silk as far as the powers that be was concerned, an accident. But when Luna speaks with me and says, "He knew that you weren't as stupid as he was. That all he'd do was screw up again somehow. Tell people about it more or knock you up again," it only reenforces the guilty feeling I have that one or the other of us (or both) was going to have to face serious consequences for how we had erred. And, in that case, Jack did what he said. He took care of it.

I turn twenty in a blur. I feel helpless as a child or as drained as if I'd staggered my way to one hundred. The gifts I receive from my fellow victors feel delivered as much as condolences as anything celebratory. I have a token party for the sake of all the locals I can enfold under the umbrella of festive generosity, but I stay out of most of it myself, sitting in the living room while everyone is in my yard eating and chatting more quietly than years past.

I watch my tape of Jack from my first birthday as a victor over and over.

I guess I'm glad, at least, that I have this recording. That the memory doesn't exist only in my mind. Here is Jack, smiling and singing for as long as this clip will last.

For twenty days, he was my husband. Since the moment we met, he was my friend.

I get the feeling that Papa is the only one who truly understands all this. I hope he knows how much I appreciate his support through everything.

We spend a lot of time together. We talk about maybe him returning early. Maybe gifting his boat to Mr. Kappe and buying a new one.

It comes out in March that Hector's girlfriend, Lilac, is four months pregnant. Barring any surprises- either via some extremely unfortunate turn of events or one of the other victors having been keeping something from the press and the rest of us, this baby will follow Kayta and Raisin's wedding as another victor first.

The first child of a victor.

Hector lets out eventually that it's going to be a girl. Names are still up for discussion. Gerik makes easy-going jokes about it. Hector's mother seems quite happy.

Though there's a lot of press pushing toward the idea, Hector is quite blunt that just because he's going to be a father doesn't mean he and Lilac will necessarily be tying the knot anytime soon. He doesn't want to rush things. I can't say I blame him.

I pray that Hector's daughter will have a peaceful life.

Sophie Varen turns up pregnant as well with no father for her child in sight. She says that she's retiring from her post to raise a family, but Aulie tells me a rumor that they asked her to choose between the baby and her job. "They're kind of peculiar out in One about that kind of thing." Apparently she didn't feel she had many years left in the position though before they would replace her with someone younger and prettier, so it was good a time as any to get out.

There is a retrospective of her five years of work in this capacity. Much of the footage includes Jack.

I agree with those who think that Jack's absence is also a contributing factor to her decision. She liked working with him. She has no interest in trying to create chemistry with a replacement.

An Avox from the Games Complex is arrested in regard to Silk's rape and murder. He is convicted in one day and hangs for his crime the next morning. It is Brendan, who was originally from 5. Who Pal introduced me to the year Silk won.

Pal believes this is a frame-up so that the troubling case will be closed (he doesn't raise the possibility that it is a cover up to hide the crimes of someone the law is less happy to finger, but that also hovers in the corners of skeptical minds), but no one cares what Pal thinks.

He did try to speak out on Brendan's behalf, but was brought to incoherence by horrible questioning- where was he when those things were happening to Silk? Why didn't he protect her then?

(He was back at the studio, talking with Jack. Silk had meant to walk two blocks down a lit, populated, major street to where they were staying)

How can anyone say those things but with the intent to destroy him? It is a wonder Pal keeps going. I wonder if he will ever manage to mentor a successful tribute again.

Although some of my friends are sort of upset about it once we've spoken regarding this question, I don't see any way to pursue the angle of Nar's potential involvement in my miscarriage (and it could've been delegated to him from someone higher up at Victor Affairs anyway) even if I had the energy to, but I don't see how I can work with him any longer with this suspicion between us.

…yet, some of the trickiest people to tread the streets of the Capitol are on my side. Shy makes an accusation against him of sexual harassment, which in light of Silk's fate is taken very seriously, and Nar is fired. I can't say I'm as bothered by her lying as I should be. Shy seems pleased with herself (considering her general character, no one takes this as a sign of wrongdoing on her part).

A woman barely older than me, Ceres Blue, takes over his position. She seems an improvement. She even comes out to Four to meet me and I take her boating. She likes butterflies and designer clothes and she lives in the Second Tier of the Third Ring of the Capitol with four white cats (I have a feeling she and Apple will get on wonderfully). She was much enamored of the public presentation of my relationship with Jack. I'm not sure whether or not they told her about our marriage as part of the information package regarding having to work with me, so I don't mention it.

"…it was a shame he was actually so sick…" she sighs over Jack, dipping her hand into the water and watching it swish around her fingers.

I don't have anything to say about that. I stare out at the buoys bobbing along one edge of the harbor.

Ceres tells me to keep in touch- maybe to call once a month or something off-season so she knows enough to manage things best for me and my tributes. She is more hopeful about future volunteers from 4 than I think the doubled demise of Jerrick and Maria should lead her to be, but she's very understanding about the general malaise I'm fighting. "You lost your good friend and then your child and your boyfriend all within a few weeks," Ceres says, "It's no wonder that you'd be depressed."

I hope Ceres will last in this job. I think she's a good person.

I continue to meet with my 'club,' though my heart isn't much in it. I sit on the beach while they run and play and practice throws learned from a book I bought in the Capitol.

Faline and Reza go out on a date. I can only wish them happiness.

Peterzeno starts going way Down-District to visit his adopted brother (Padre) Danio and picking fights in search of someone with good practical experience to help him and the rest of the club members practice. Danio and Padre Tino and all get pretty mad at him about it, but it nets the club one new member, Angelo Son, and when it comes to actual martial arts, he can fill my sandals several times over and then some. He's the right addition at the right time, I suppose.

I say that I need to time to think and there's no lie in that. For a while, it seemed my life was moving far too fast, but now it's slowed down. I have a lot of time to think and a lot of thinking too do.

Aulie sends out a box of t-shirts one day- yellow ones, with waves on the bottom. A small ring of words around the District 4 emblem in the center proclaims us the "Special Athletics Club." I guess it's official then. Mine says "coach" on the back.

I suppose by the time the Fifteen Games begin, I am still thinking. Rodrigo Shoal does the noble thing- what Hector and Gerik had long guessed that he would do- in his last year of eligibility and volunteers. A sixteen-year-old girl named Tuesday O'Taidhg is reaped from the Up-District bayous. She asks to just be called "Tu," her nickname.

Neither Rodrigo or Tu is going to be bad tribute. I owe it to them to get my head in the game. At least Apple and Aulie are there to assist.

Ceres gets me on television with Hector and Gerik and we do blab plenty, but it's not the same as what I had there with Jack. If my tributes can prove themselves with good enough scores, Gerik promises we can get an alliance together between our districts this year.

1 and 2 field pairs of volunteers. 9 yields Kiki Vetiver, a sister of Luna, and Noah Mallow, who I think I may have met briefly when I stopped in that district (but perhaps I am mixing him up with someone else).

I am doing what I can, but the void where Jack would be- joking, making commentary, boosting One's tributes- it haunts me.

In 'Mentor Central,' a woman I don't know fills his seat.

Maybe I was wrong before. Maybe only another victor from Four can truly be my own kind.

...And, even then, I might fail to keep them safe (yet, oh, how I want them anyway- Rodrigo or Tu or whoever- I will take anyone I can help save).

Pal's tributes die, again, on the first day of the Fifteenth Hunger Games. Mine live (and, for the first time, the alliance with 2 comes through). I ask him to sit with me.

Everyone looks at us now and again with sympathy or pity or a cool reserve to stay carefully away from such twin vortexes of disaster, at least until we've proven that we aren't about to take anyone else down with us. We are bereft; in mourning still - we may be for a long time.

It took about fifteen years for victors to fall- as mortal and fallible as anyone else. Should fifteen years sound, in this case, like a long time or a short one? Jack had some time and he used it… Silk died young enough that she could've been reaped again.

"Your hand is trembling," Pal murmurs. He reaches out and takes it. Despite all the layers he always seems to be wearing, his hand feels very cold.

In a way, I think, all of our colleagues are waiting. Silk, then Jack. Will Pal or I fall next? Will all of us crumble prematurely into dust?

I can't entirely say I blame them for wondering, but I vow to myself I won't be the next domino to tumble. And I will do my best to hold Pal up along with me. I will struggle on, even if it never stops hurting. I will remember all that I can, even if that only inflames the pain.

I'm going to live.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

This was very much a labor of love (a lot longer word-wise and time-wise to write than I expected). Thank you so much for reading!