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I know it the instant it happens, clearer than I expected to know it. I’ve noticed this before, small things happening exactly when I want them to happen badly enough. I’ve spent weeks telling myself it was coincidence or my own desperate mind reading meaning into things that don’t have any. I don’t believe that anymore. I think wanting something here, hard enough, is closer to doing it than I ever understood.

She goes still, staring down at the page like she’s trying to work out whether she imagined it.

Eventually, she sets it back down, spine up, exactly where she found it. I hear her decide, quiet yet certain, that she wants to be the one to finish it.

Once she’s unpacked her suitcase and made up the bed, she turns toward the door, ready to head outside, and stops.

The closet door that was closed is now open.

That was me, too.

There was no hand behind it, no effort, nothing I did on purpose the way I used to do things when I had a body capable of purpose. It happened the same way the pages turned. A current running straight from wanting to happening, no visible seam between the two.

I’m starting to understand this new way of being, even if I can’t yet explain the mechanics. It isn’t about touch. It’s about feeling something strongly enough, wanting something with my whole remaining self. Something in this world answers back, small and imprecise, but real. A door. A page. A closet latch that shouldn’t give without a hand on it.

I don’t know yet how far that reaches, or what it costs me each time I use it—if it costs me anything at all. I only know it’s mine to use, whether I fully understand it or not.

She barely reacts, still standing right there in the doorway. Old houses settle, she tells herself, and I let her believe it, mostly because I don’t have a better explanation to offer her even if I could.

Outside, she starts toward the creek.

I don’t know if I can go there. I don’t know if I’m capable of standing at the place I took my last breath. But she’s walking toward it anyway, drawn by nothing more than curiosity. She has no idea what that water took from two people who loved each other.

She’s humming as she goes. A tune she clearly doesn’t recognize. Her brow furrows like she’s trying to place it.

It’s the song I used to sing off-key around the cottage. An obscure melody I learned at summer camp one year and only remembered half the words. Hearing it now, on the path toward the one spot I can’t bring myself to face, knocks something loose inside me. I wonder if I put the melody there the same way I put the book and door there. Some wanting so constant and in the background that I never noticed myself doing it until it showed up in a stranger’s mouth.

Snow was falling the last time I was there, when I left Samuel on his knees, my body still in his arms. The sound that came out of him when he finally understood I wasn’t coming back—I don’t have a word for it. I don’t think there is one. Something torn loose from a place so deep inside him it didn’t sound human anymore, just raw and endless, swallowed up by the snow that kept falling and the creek that kept running like the world hadn’t noticed anything had changed.

I tried to reach him. I remember the desperate, useless instinct to touch his face the way I’d done a thousand times before. But he couldn’t feel me. He couldn’t hear me. He just knelt there in the snow, rocking me.

My father found us first. I’ll never forget the sound he made too, something quieter than Sam’s but no less broken. The particular horror of a man realizing the daughter he raised would never open her eyes again. He was the one who finally took my body from Sam’s arms, gentle in a way that undoes me to think about, murmuring something I couldn’t hear.

Knox got Samuel to his feet. I don’t know how. Sam wasn’t capable of standing on his own, wasn’t capable of anything. Knox got an arm under him anyway, and half carried him back toward the cottage, snow already starting to cover the place we’d just been only minutes before.

The memory hits with enough force, causing a sharp pain in my chest.

She stops.

I feel it happen almost before I understand I’ve done it, some instinct older and more urgent than thought reaching for her the only way I apparently can. Not a hand on her shoulder. Just the wanting itself, aimed hard enough at the shape of stop, and a moment later, she does.

She stands there a long moment, confused, glancing back over her shoulder like she expects to find someone standing behind her. There’s no one there for her to see. There’s just me, or whatever’s left of me, close enough to touch her and still a thousand miles too far to explain it to her.

Slowly, she turns back toward the cottage, the pull gone from her as quickly as it came.

I don’t know yet what that makes me, exactly. Not a ghost in the way people mean when they use the word carelessly. I’m something that can’t be seen or helped, but can still bend the shape of a room if I want to badly enough.

Whatever it is, I know it isn’t nothing.

And I only know I’m not finished learning what else I can do with it.

Samuel

Sober feels a lot like being skinned. Nobody warns you about that part. Everyone talks about the shakes, the sweating, the nights you can’t sleep because your body doesn’t know how to function without something dulling it first.

Nobody mentions that once all of that passes, once your hands are steady again and your head’s clear, you’re just left there. Raw. Exposed. Nothing left to blame for how much everything still hurts.

I go through the motions of day-to-day life. The schedule Knox set for me. Meals at the table instead of alone in my room. A shift in the garage most afternoons, something to keep my hands busy even when my mind refuses to follow. Knox checking in more than he needs to, showing up in doorways at exactly the moments I start disappearing into myself before I’m too far to find my own way back out.