A line from Dad’s journal flashed in my mind’s eye:Let’s get you that yes.
Maybe that was all I needed. A yes. Did he love me? Did I love him? Was this all a lie?
Let’s get you that yes.
“Ready?” Rossi’s voice was steady. Familiar as my history, my childhood. An uncle, an ally. He would be my eyes if I was lost and staring at the world through heart-colored glasses.
He had my back.
He draped his arm across my shoulder. “Do you know how to summon him?”
I shook my head. “I think he’ll hear me.” I stepped forward, just one, two, three steps so that I was off of the concrete pad and on the little span of grass-covered dirt and sand.
Ahead of me was another drop, this one a hill I could walk straight down, and beyond that the flat wide reach of raw basalt shelf jutting out into the ocean waves that rolled over it.
I knelt and ran my fingertips across the dirt by my boots, peering through the darkness for what I needed. My hand finally brushed a little rock, and I tucked it into my palm, and stood. I placed the stone near my heart, hoping Bathin would feel me, know I was here, waiting on the edge of this stormy dark sea.
“Bathin,” I said quietly to the stone, loudly in my mind, in my heart. “We need to talk. About the scissors. About Delaney’s soul. About you and me. I need to know…know you’re okay. Please come here. Come talk to me.”
The edges of the stone bit into the soft flesh of my palm, but I couldn’t seem to stop squeezing it. There was no guarantee this would work. I wasn’t going by logic or tradition or rules. There wasn’t a lot of logic in this at all, just a trembling, nervous hope.
I was just a speck of light holding a microscopic stone on a tiny planet spinning through a vast and endless dark.
There was no reason for him to hear me. There was no reason for him to answer if he did. There was no reason for him to meet me here, at the edge of the world.
Minutes ticked and ticked and ticked. He did not answer.
My heartbeat, which had been fast, nervous, excited, slowed. I closed my eyes and tipped my face to the stars.
I knew what this felt like—being left behind. I understood loneliness, had become comfortable with silence. So I breathed in, and breathed out, letting the wind whisk away my hope like sifted sand.
I would be okay. Iwasokay. Whatever I felt about Bathin, that complicated mix of emotions, that love I’d fought and reasoned into submission, was not to be.
It was time to let go. I’d had my answer and it was yes.
Yes, you should be alone.
I stood there for an hour. I knew that because Rossi finally came up behind me and draped his arm across my shoulder again. “He’s an asshole. Let’s get you home. You deserve more than he can give.”
I huffed out a short laugh and nodded. I was not going to cry. The tears were there, waiting, but I was scrubbed clean, empty. Free. The wind, the water, the salt, the stars, had soaked into me, scoured the tangles of my heart until the strings unwound.
I was unknotted, floating, lifted by starlight and wind.
There, above myself, in the stars, in the blackness, alone, alone, alone, I felt safe. I felt whole.
“Myra.”
My heart jumped and the spell was broken. I wasn’t floating, not up in that wide black sky. But I still felt clean, scrubbed, settled.
I felt new.
I tipped my head down and opened my eyes.
Bathin strode up out of the darkness of the sea like some kind of a hero of old. His dark hair was longer, his eyes wilder, and instead of an expensive suit he wore black. Black leather pants and black tunic with burnished armor flowing over the width of his shoulders and chest.
The ocean raged behind him, but that man was rage embodied.
His eyes glowed red, embers burning iron hot. He didn’t stop until he was a few feet away from me, just out of reach. As if we needed that space to maneuver in case I had a knife. Or in case he did.
