“Hey.”
Ellory tore her eyes from Colt to focus on Liam, who had appeared at her side with two glasses of a dark liquid she assumed was brandy. His sweater was royal purple, and his hair was windswept, and he was smiling, always smiling, even here in the waking world, where they barely knew each other.
“You know the point of these things is to network, right?” He extended one of the glasses. “You can’t keep wallflowering. We can all see you.”
Ellory took the glass, but she didn’t drink from it. “Is it wallflowering if I’m in front of a window?”
Behind her, the sun had finally set, a half-moon taking its place against the navy sky. Colt had never planted those evergreen trees, since that conversation had been erased alongside the dreamworld and the Old Masters, but the bare branches that remained were beautiful in their own way. They were a testament to the resilience of living things, that they could lose it all and still blossom given a little time.
Like them, she just needed a little time.
Liam chuckled around his next sip. “Come sit with us. Farrah wants to ask you about your research project with Colt.”
“And you?”
“Me?” He shrugged. “I think you’re cool. Come prove me right.”
Ellory was no more able to resist him here than she had been in her dreamworld. She let his golden retriever–esque enthusiasm sweep her away, until she was sandwiched between Liam and Farrah in the dining room, deep in conversation about school assignments and bookstores, lacrosse practice and charity functions.
It wasn’t that Ellory had avoided Liam since destroying the Old Masters and putting the Lost Eight and the Graves Ghost to rest, but she hadn’t gone out of her way to fulfill her promise to a man who didn’t exist either. Her memories of what hadn’t been were as painful for her as the three years of time she’d lost, trapped in the tower of a lodge that no longer existed, and she already felt out of sync with the world. Tai had Cody. The other Godwin Scholars had one another. Ellory had a love that only she remembered and an aunt she spent half her phone calls lying to.
She’d started keeping a journal, just so the things she’d lost in that world—the memories of Miss Claudette, of the attack on the fictitious quad, of all the things magic had taken away without her even realizing—were preserved. She was strong enough now to pick which memories she wanted to give away to cast her spells, but it calmed her to know that something, somewhere, would remember what she couldn’t.
But Ellory couldn’t sulk forever, especially not in the wake of Liam’s innocent olive branch. She had freed herself—freed them all—so they could live a life that they chose. It was time for her to start living it.
After all, the pain was part of what made it real.
***
The journalism major at Warren University was a prestigiousmurder weapon.
Ellory stared in dismay at her blank Word document and the article she hadn’t written that was due to her editor in four hours. Boone had moved the deadline three times already, and she dreaded asking him for another extension. He was a nightmare to work under. Her writing had never been better, but her sanity had dwindled to frequent daydreams of slamming his head into one of the printers.
It was only three weeks into the spring semester of her freshman year—the semester she’d missed the first time around—and already stress flavored the stagnant air inside Graves Library. Ellory had witnessed six breakdowns in the hour since she’d claimed this table, and she was doing her best to avoid becoming the seventh. Two freshmen giggled their way through a muted video on their phones, and that was the only levity in the room. Every other station was packed with studying students, red-eyed and pale, carrying flasks filled with either coffee or vodka.
Ellory wouldn’t judge either way.
She returned her attention to the cursor that mocked her with every blink. Then a shadow fell over the table, and her article became the last thing on her mind.
Hudson Graves stood before her like he’d stepped from the pages of an airline magazine. His hair was styled into its usual fade, but the black curls that tumbled over his forehead were not, for once, dyed white blond. His natural hair color looked good on him.
Then again, what didn’t?
“Can I sit here?” he asked, as though he expected her to stab him through the hand. “All the other tables on this floor are full.”
Ellory stared at him for a little too long before she managed a silent nod.
Every day. She had come to the Graves every day in the hopesof catching a glimpse of the man pulling out the chair across from her. Since she had switched her major, they no longer had classes together. Colt’s research project had become her new work-study, so she and Hudson didn’t run into each other at the coffee shop. And she wasn’t bold enough to take a car to the off-campus housing of three graduating seniors who barely knew who she was.
So she’d come to the Graves before and after classes, staying until she ran out of work to do and felt guilty hoarding a table from someone who actually needed it. All she had learned so far was that Hudson must have come to the library only to see her, because without their preexisting relationship, he wasnever fucking here.
Until now.
“Yes, my family donated this library,” Hudson drawled without looking up from his textbook. “Please stop staring at me.”
“Huh? Oh. No, that’s not—no.”
He gave her a disbelieving look. “That’s not…?”
