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I folded one leg onto the chair.

“Does it feel weird?” I said.

“What?”

“Knowing that… it’s over?”

“Yeah.”

He pulled an envelope from between two books on a bookcase and pushed a photo from it toward me.

I could see it was Damian immediately. The same dark wavy hair, but a little longer, and the same blue eyes, but with dark circles under them. He wore black jeans and a black T-shirt. Next to him, Octavia looked radiant in a dusky rose dress. And ice cold.

“I was thirteen there, a week after she branded me,” he said, his index finger resting on the edge of the photo. “I promised myself I’d get out of it one day.”

My throat caught. I blinked and looked away, then returned to the photo.

“I wish I could go back in time,” I said, angling the photo so I could look at it better, “and tell you that one day it would all be okay. That you just had to hold on.”

“Me too,” he said, returning the photo to the envelope.

Later that morning, we drove to Branwen’s, the silver bowl on my lap, the fog rolling off the bay and smothering the redwoods. For the first time, Damian took the jeep.

“No one’s tailing us right now,” he said. “They’re too busy losing their minds about last night.”

We stopped at a garden center along the way.

“I’ll just be a minute,” he said.

“You’re buying plants?”

“You’ll see.”

I waited in the jeep while he went inside. My phone lit from my lap. A text from Jess, only to me.

I’m sorry

I wasn’t ready to forgive her. But I didn’t want to ignore her, either. She’d woken up alone, knowing she’d lived a lie for two months, and now she didn’t even have friends to talk to about it.

I know, I replied.

Damian returned carrying a small tree in a planter. He wedged it between the edge of the backseat and the back of the front seat. I looked at him, quizzically.

“Birch,” he said.

“For after a fire?”

“Exactly. No more fires,” he said.

As always, Branwen was at the door before we crossed the front yard, and this time she hugged me as soon as I reached the porch. Damian stood behind me, the tree in his arms. He set it down by a rowan bush and hugged her. She squeezed him tight, tiny in his arms, barely reaching his shoulders. We followed her inside.

“Well done,” she said, squeezing my arm. “I knew you were the one. I saw it a long time ago, right around the time you were born. That’s when I painted the fox,” she said, ushering us into the kitchen and pointing to the painting above the fire.

“Please, hear me out,” I said, gently. “I’ve heard a lot about all the things I was chosen for. The retreat was chosen for me. Damian was assigned to me. This part—” I looked at Damian across the table. “This part I need to have chosen on purpose.”

Branwen’s eyebrows went up. I couldn’t tell if she was offended or not. “Someone told me once that the signs themselves don’t have any power,” I said, glancing at Damian again. “It’s how you read them. So if you painted a fox before I was born, then the fox was waiting for whoever was willing to bury it. It got me. That’s not fate. That’s just who stopped the car.”

Damian didn’t say anything because he didn’t have to. They were his words, now come home.