They disappeared around the corner, still laughing, still oblivious.
“Did you make that guy fall?” Ramona asked, stifling a small smile.
Zara smirked. “I don’t know what you mean, Mortal.”
Silence settled back over the street.
Ramona and Zara stood there, a careful foot apart now, neither of them looking at the other. It seemed Zara was thinking the same thing she was.
“Well,” Ramona said eventually.
“Yes,” Zara agreed.
Another beat of silence.
“We should go inside,” Ramona said.
“Yes.”
“We should sleep.”
“That would be wise.”
Neither of them moved.
Finally, Zara let out a breath — something that might have been a laugh if it weren’t so quiet. “Ramona.”
“Yeah?”
“Go on, I’m right behind you.”
Ramona’s heart ached. Her own emotion, or Zara’s? She couldn’t tell anymore.
She unlocked the door and went inside and tried not to think about how tomorrow night, if the ritual worked, she wouldn’t be able to feel Zara’s emotions anymore.
Wouldn’t feel the warmth of the tether.
Wouldn’t know, without asking, whether Zara was happy or sad or scared.
Wouldn’t know whether any of this had been real.
They walked in silence down the hallway and into the apartment, letting the door click shut behind them as they shuffled into Ramona’s room.
A few moments later, Ramona lay in the dark and pressed her hand against her chest, where the tether hummed — steady, warm, insistent — one last time before everything changed.
If the ritual worked, Zara would leave. Not dramatically — not with a farewell speech or a grand gesture or any of the things Ramona had spent her whole life wanting from the people she loved. She would simply go back to where she came from, because that was where she belonged, and Ramona would be here, where she belonged, and the three weeks between would become just another chapter in a life already full of strange things that had ended too soon. Zara would be gone, and Ramona would wake up and the tether would be gone and the apartment would be quiet in a way it hadn’t been since Zara arrived, and she would make coffee for one, and that would be that.
She tried to imagine it — the silence, the empty armchair, mornings without Zara’s precise handwriting in notebooks left on the desk. Tried to picture going back to the way things were before, when Ramona’s biggest problem was whether theself-help section needed reorganizing and her biggest fear was running into Simone at the grocery store. It should have been easy to imagine. It had been her life for two years. But sitting here now, with Zara’s warmth on the other side of the room and the tether humming between them like a heartbeat, Ramona couldn’t quite remember what it had felt like to be alone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Forests felt sodifferent at night.
During the day, they were just woods a short drive north of Fernwick — scraggly trees and underbrush, the kind of unremarkable forest that backed up against neighborhoods. Kids cut through them on the way to school. Dog walkers and birders used the trails. Nothing special.
But at night, under a new moon, with the last light of dusk bleeding out of the sky like a wound closing — they were something else entirely.
The trees pressed closer together the deeper they walked, their bare branches interlocking overhead like fingers laced in prayer. Or warning. The snow on the ground was untouched, pristine, reflecting Ramona’s flashlight in a way that made everything glow faintly blue. Their footsteps crunched in the silence — the only sound besides the occasional crack of a branch settling under the weight of frost.
