“I’m really fucking this up,” he said, sighing. “You have it backward. I won’t commit to anything because of how I feel for you. You mean too much to me to get this wrong, and I need to know I can still be the man you need me to be when this is all over. If you’re honest with yourself, you need to know that too.”
“Fair enough,” she said softly. “I only needed to tell you where I stand.”
“I know.” He tucked her hair back and kissed the hollow of her cheek.
Elloven smiled at her lap. “I asked you not to question me. I need to remember that goes both ways.”
Jesstin had been holding onto something for a while, and until that moment, when he felt he had less to offer than she deserved, he wasn’t even sure he’d share it. “El, you asked me before if I could see or speak with Gennady.”
She quickly pivoted his way. “You can?”
He paused, then nodded. “Not here. Not in the Infinitum. But out there... yes.”
Elloven flattened a palm to her chest. “You can speak with Gen?”
“He’s, uh...” This was why he’d hesitated before. But she deserved some piece of her brother. “That day in Mythgarde, when Esme came to see me, I was going to tell her no. I didn’t want any trouble. It was Gen who changed my mind.”
Elloven went deadly quiet.
“He comes and goes. Sometimes to needle me.” He chuckled. “But he loved you above everyone, and he was adamant I help you, do what he should have been there to do.” He swallowed. “I did it for him. And then, as I got to know you, I did it for you.”
“And, ah...” She cleared her throat. “Why can’t you see him here, if he’s dead?”
“Because he’s not here.”
“Why?”
“He never crossed over.”
She swung a hard look his way. “Why, Jesstin?”
He couldn’t meet her eyes. “I used to wonder why I could only see certain people and not all, then my mom, when I saw her in the market, told me you could be there or here but not both.”
“He must have told you who killed him. Why they killed him.”
“The dead can’t tell us the secrets of the living.” It was a weak answer, even if it was true. But it wasn’t the whole truth, and he knew this moment would eventually come full circle, and he’d have to face it.
“Well, somebody knows,” she said quietly. “Somebody knows.” She settled back against the pillow and pulled the small blanket over her. “Thank you for finally telling me the truth.”
He wanted her to scream, fight, curse—anything. Anything else.
“Can I hold you? Elloven?”
She didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself, but right as he accepted the well-deserved brush-off, her hand reached back for his and pulled it around her.
They hadn’t spoken all day. Elloven knew the silence was hers and that she’d be the one who’d need to break it, but she didn’t know where to begin.
It wasn’t the revelation that Jesstin had been talking to her brother all along, though that hurt. There were so many things he could have told her about the past years, memories she’d never get with Gennady—little stories and anecdotes that might seem incidental to him but were so much more to her.
The real reason she’d said nothing was because she couldn’t put aside the notion he was lying about something even more important.
She’d listened to him pretend to sleep for most of the night. His little sighs. She’d been feigning as well, because the same instinct that told her Jesstin was her future, her fate, was turning her down a different path.
Elloven didn’t know what to do about it. It broke her heart to even contemplate it.
They came upon another river. This one flowed west, unlike the eastward one from before, and it was Jesstin who voiced the questions she’d been thinking. Which direction should a river flow if it was in a spiral? Could a river even exist in one? Is this even a damn spiral at all? If she could read his cursed map, she might understand what he couldn’t.
When he reached into the dirt and pulled out the half-buried sign that read Desidero, they both took a step back.
