My hands were shaking. I realized it only when I curled them into fists and felt my nails bite my palms.
I forced the next words out before I could swallow them back down.
“Did she hear me?” I asked.
It came out wrong. Too raw. Too desperate. Like I was sixteen again and begging the universe not to take something from me.
“When I talked to her,” I said, voice cracking, “when I asked her if it was okay to… to move on. Did any of it reach her? Or was I talking to dirt like an idiot?”
Gideon didn’t answer right away.
Outside, Cal laughed at something. A bright, careless sound. It felt obscene in the face of what I was asking.
Finally Gideon sighed—soft, like the air left him reluctantly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The honesty should’ve been comforting. It wasn’t. It felt like the floor vanishing.
“That’s it?” My voice rose. I couldn’t help it. “You don’t know?”
Gideon’s eyes stayed on mine. “That’s the honest answer.”
I laughed, short and ugly. “Honest. Great. I’m glad you’re honest while I’m—” I cut myself off, because the rest of the sentence tasted like blood.
While I’m falling apart. While I’m drowning. While I’m standing in your office asking you if my wife is gone-gone or just… far away.
The silence swelled.
“You’re not the first person,” Gideon said carefully, “to go to a thin place looking for answers from someone they lost. And you won’t be the last.”
The words were supposed to make me feel less alone.
Instead they made me furious.
Because I didn’t want to be a statistic. I didn’t want to be part of some universal experience.
I wantedAnna.
I wanted my wife.
I wanted her voice, her warmth, the way she used to say my name like it was something worth keeping.
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “You could find out.”
Gideon didn’t move, but something in him changed. A subtle tightening. Like a door had been touched.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You’re a witch,” I said, and it came out bitter, because I didn’t know what else to do with the pain. “You bargain with spirits. You know things about death and what comes after that most people don’t. You could?—”
“No,” Gideon said immediately.
The sharpness of it startled me.
I blinked. “You didn’t even let me finish.”
“I don’t need you to finish.”
