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“Sometimes I wondered the same. But it always felt so much like hope, and I had so little of it to go around. Using it just to get one foot in front of the other was hard enough, if I’m being honest.”

“And how much do you have of it now?”

“Enough that it terrifies me out of my mind.”

“Then let me set it at ease.”

I go to him then. But before I can get there, he puts a hand up. He stops me in my tracks and takes a breath. Opens his eyes. “No. No, I can do this. Let me try to do this,” he says, and oh, I love him for using the word try.

I love him for the halting way he goes about leaning down, like something rusty from long disuse. I love him for the way he touches my face—as if I’m so fragile I might break. But most of all, I love him for the chaste kiss, as tender as hands cupped around a baby bird. Then another, less so. Then another, even less than that, each one more confident than the last until finally he seems to realize I won’t turn to smoke and blow away, and he crushes me into his arms.

He makes love to me like that, in fact.

Like someone relearning how to be a man who loves.

And most important, is deeply loved in return.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

He makes me strengthen the guarding spell around the apartment before he will go to sleep. “Turn it into something that will kill anything that might want to kill you if it tries to cross a certain boundary—and make the death extra gruesome and juicy,” he says, with so demonic a look of vicious delight all over his face at the thought that I have to obey.

Then once he’s done, he practically passes out.

Which isn’t that much of a surprise—apparently, he’s been patrolling around my building practically every day and night. It’s the reason he knew where to find me in Whitby. Why he followed me: Well, I had to, just in case, he had whispered to me, after we were done demolishing each other.

Because it’s sinking in now, it seems.

Someone wanted me dead in the library.

Someone has always wanted me dead in every life I’ve had.

All my memories of dying, bloodily—it was someone else, someone other than him. Someone with a serious stake in watching me suffer. Or watching him suffer, Freya says in my head—because I can hear her now. Her voice is like a lilting wind, a curled kiss, wonderfully fresh to the chorus in my mind and yet familiar all the same.

And I trust it, instinctively.

If anyone should know, it’s her.

She was the first, after all. She was the one killed before all the others.

“Because of his father,” I say, so startled by so obvious an idea that I speak aloud. And it’s Phone who answers me. From the space under the chest of drawers that she shoved herself under in shame.

“Exactly what I was thinking,” she blurts out, excitedly. Then seems to realize we’re not on speaking terms, and tries to explain. “I mean, not that I was listening to your conversations—I have learned my lesson fully about meddling in your affairs, I swear it. And especially since there are so many things I missed, over what seems to be quite a lot of time. Though of course I can’t speak to my former selves … I don’t seem to be able to remember like you.”

She sounds so mournful about it, too.

So lost without any idea of who she was.

It makes me crouch down and reach for her. And she doesn’t try to snap my fingers off with her butt flap. Instead she buzzes happily once she’s cradled in my hands. My Phone. My constant friend. “Your name is Agnatha,” I say, and she makes a little oh sound. A sound like a little droid when it’s sad.

“That’s the one I chose for myself, anyway,” she explains. “Before I even knew all of this. Before it started coming back to me like it’s coming back to you. Do you think it’s coming back to me because it’s coming back to you?”

The mirror, the stone, the Walkman, I think.

All lost to her, too.

“I’m sorry, Phone,” I say.

“But I’m the one that did wrong.”