"Where will you go?"
"Back to my life. My family. My world where things make sense."
"You belong here too."
"No." She met his eyes, and she saw him flinch at whatever was in hers. "I belonged to him. Without that, I'm just a human in a world that wants to eat me. I want to go home. Please."
Thaine's jaw worked. She could see him fighting for arguments, for reasons to make her stay. Finally, his shoulders dropped.
"When?"
"Now. Before I lose my nerve. Before he wakes up and I have to see him look through me again."
He stood slowly, like his bones hurt. "The veil is thin near the western border. I can take you through."
The walk through the castle was agony. Every corner held a memory. Here, where he'd pressed her against the door after the first dinner. The dining hall where he'd fed her from his own hand. The corridor that led to gardens she'd never see again.
At his door, she stopped.
Her feet wouldn't move past it. Her hand rose without permission, palm flat against the wood. On the other side, she could hear him stirring. Waking. In moments he'd rise, dress in his dark clothes, and go about his day without a single thought of her.
"Please," she whispered to the door, to him, to any power that might be listening. "Please remember."
She waited, just for a moment. Just to torture herself with the possibility that it might open, that he might remember, that this might not be the end.
The door stayed closed.
Thaine's hand settled on her shoulder, gentle but insistent. She let him guide her away, each step feeling like tearing off pieces of herself and leaving them behind.
The forest paths opened reluctantly for Thaine. The journey felt both endless and far too quick, her body moving while her heart screamed to turn back, to try one more time, to fight harder. But she was so tired of fighting, so tired of being strong.
Before she knew it, they were at the veil, that shimmer in the air that separated worlds.
"Your car is just beyond," Thaine said quietly.
She could see it through the shimmer. Her dusty, ordinary car in an ordinary parking lot in an ordinary world where magic didn't exist and neither did Forest Kings who forgot the women they'd claimed.
"Thaine." Her voice broke completely. "What if he never remembers?"
"Then he's lost something precious." His voice was rough. "And he'll never know it."
That broke her. The tears came hard and fast, her shoulders shaking with the force of them. She covered her face with her hands, trying to muffle the sounds, but they tore from her anyway.
"I have to go," she gasped between sobs. "If I don't go now, I never will."
"I know."
She stepped toward the veil, then stopped. "Tell him—" She stopped. Tell him what? That she loved him? That she'd chosen him even when he'd been cruel? That losing him like this was worse than if he'd died? "Don't tell him anything."
She stepped through.
The transition was jarring, as everything magical, everything otherworldly, everything that had made her feel like she might be more than ordinary, fell away. She stood in a cracked parking lot beside a car covered in two weeks of dust and bird droppings, wearing clothes that smelled of the fae realm but were already losing that scent in the mundane air.
The car door handle was cold under her fingers.
She got in and turned the key. Nothing. The engine clicked but wouldn't catch. Of course. Two weeks of cold had killed the battery. She turned the key again, and again, each failed attempt feeling like another small cruelty.
"Please," she whispered to the dead engine. "Please, just work."
