I could breathe. I kissed her head. I could breathe.
We tookthe long way back to the lighthouse after that.
We were quiet, loathing words. Circe took my hand and held it in hers.
She looked at me with a smile, but then her gaze drifted past me, and her steps died. I turned to see what had caught her attention.
There was a dead tree, its skeleton-like branches climbing like a swiveling staircase. In the midst of its roots, there was a lone gravestone covered in snow that bulged from the earth.
Circe dropped my hand and walked to it.
I followed her.
The wind charged the leaves around us. With every step closer to the gravestone, despair filled the cracks inside me.
There was no name no date on the headstone.
There was only a dash.
“What does it mean?” Circe asked.
I crouched before it, took off my glove, and ran my palm across the rough surface. My eyes blinked, witnessing a montage of heartbreak unfold before them. The image shook before it cleared.A lush island, browning leaves, and the sun lowering over the ocean, leaving behind a sky that looks like war’s aftermath. I’m on my knees, hands shaking as I carve a dash into the stone. Sadness consumes me, making me feel much older than my true age. This sadness presses down on my brows, making my chin tremble, provoking tears to chase one after the other.And I felt his pain as if it were my own. I wished for the aching of my heart to stop.Why are we so sad?I wanted to ask him as I existed in the corner of our mind.I could hardly breathe, striking the metal tool across the stone with angry and forsaken strokes. I did this again and again, feeling like each deep strike of metal against stone was instead cutting into me. After finishing the dash, I fell back with a guttural scream that caused me to clutch my chest and fist my shirt because the grief was so intense that it physically pained me everywhere. My reflection appeared in the steel tool,and I recognized him.
It was the same man who’d jumped from the top of the lighthouse.
Then I was sucked out of it as one would be awakened.
Circe laid her hand on my shoulder. “What happened?”
I flinched, returning to the present day, the cold, the snow, but my chest was in knots with phantom despair and a miserable urge to kiss her.
Decades have come and passed. The gravestone was no longer sharp-edged and ashes but weathered and smoke. I understood as my hand slipped from it.
I looked at Circe, my chest aching.
“Helovedher,” I said, spitting outlovefor the first time as though it were a vulgar thing. “He loved her, with no end and no beginning, with no birth or expiration. He loved, eternally, and it broke him.”
I turned to look her in the eyes again.
“I want to show you something.”
It was almost nightfall.
I took her hand and pulled her in front of me, hoping she wouldn’t be angry with me for keeping her here longer than she could afford.
Daylight cast a soulless color across the sky. I pointed to the top of the lighthouse. It was difficult to see when the cold burned our eyes and snow fell lazily from above. “Watch. Just up there where the beam cuts through.”
She shivered in my arms, eyes steering toward Weeping Hollow, then back up to where I told her to look. She was growing impatient.
“Any second now,” I insisted.
Just as the words left me, the broken man appeared on the gallery deck at the top of the lighthouse. Flickering at first, then turning on at once.
Circe’s gasp floated, and I held her close. “He appears every day at this time,” I told her. “I don’t know who he is or how it came to be this way. All I know is that he’s trapped in a death echo.” The two of us watched agony distort all his features as he struggled with himself at the edge of the deck. His bare feet teetered, ready to let go and fall to his death at any moment. And no matter how many nights I watched him, it didn’t make it any easier.
I held her tighter, pulling her flush against me. “I’ve heard stories of it but have never seen anything like it before coming here.”
“What’s a death echo?”
