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And it’s so clear in my head—all the clipped and curling intricacies of his accent, all the sardonicism threading through underneath—that for a moment I think I’m imagining it. Dreaming while awake—or rather, having a nightmare while I am. Because of course he hasn’t come to be kind to me, he hasn’t come to tell me that I am a great and beautiful sorceress.

I will never hear that again.

That’s all gone now.

And this is in its place: the stranger in the elegant suit with no overcoat, unable to feel the cold and so uncaring if it tries to sting him. Though naturally that isn’t what he’s wearing here. Here it’s the leather jacket, the shirt he stole from his own place, back when he was someone else. The boots, the jeans. The ones I made for him, I realize, though I don’t think that really says anything at all.

His face is a void.

“Oh, go away, for once, please just go away,” I tell him.

But why would he? He’s probably been waiting for me to come out and play since he became this version again three days ago. I bet his head is full of every embarrassing thing I ever said and did with the man he was, and now he can use every single one against me. It will be fodder forever, and honestly that thought just makes me want to walk into the ocean to an even greater degree than I already did. I could just step off this cliff right now.

Nothing would save me.

“I want to, but I think you’re about to do something very foolish.”

“Afraid you won’t get to do it to me yourself? My body seized from your spindly fingers because I did it first,” I say, then tilt my head to one side. Make my voice soft and musing. “I wonder how my times I had the same idea. Throw myself away before you could do it for me.”

“I have told you a thousand times, I have never, ever killed you.”

“Just because I can’t remember dying doesn’t mean you didn’t kill me.”

“No memory and yet you call me a murderer anyway.”

“Because you are one. You are one,” I hiss at him, hundreds of years of hatred coming out of me all at once. All this seething resentment, now so fierce I couldn’t contain it inside me if I tried. It spills out, red hot with the one horror I didn’t want to face. “And not just of me but of the man I love, the man I loved. The man I now have to see probably every day of my endless lives with someone else inside his body. My every agony and every torment wearing the corpse of the only man I’ve ever truly adored, needed, wanted, liked. Even fucking liked.”

Then I laugh, I laugh.

Though it’s a hysterical kind of thing. Partly because the truth of this suddenly strikes me brutally—that I can’t recall ever feeling so little as that for any man at all. But mostly it’s just the conclusion I come to because of all these thoughts. The one I voice even more furiously than the last.

“You will kill me, and the last thing I will ever see is his face. It will be the sweetest, most loving man I have known, with his hands around my throat. And he will tell me as he does that he finds it fun to destroy all my hopes and dreams and joy. That he hates me almost as much as I loved him—do you have any idea what that’s like? Are you even capable of understanding the pain of that?” I say, and get ready for him to mock me in return.

He seems to be building to it.

I can almost see him bursting with it.

He’s breathing hard, suddenly, and his hands are fists, and his expression is utterly fathomless. Filled with something I don’t understand, something that I want to see as amusement, delight at my torment, but in those last moments before he suddenly breaks I think I know it isn’t.

And then it forces its way out of him, all in rush.

Practically a roar, loud enough that it rivals the rumble of sudden thunder, the crash of the waves. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, of course I fucking do,” he rages, fist raised, but not to strike me. To seize something, I think.

To take what I’ve denied he has.

Though I don’t understand what that could really be. And he doesn’t seem inclined to tell me. He turns away before I can scoff, or goad him into saying, that fist suddenly pressed to his mouth. Like it’s better if he keeps whatever it is inside—and strangely, I find myself agreeing.

Just seeing him like this seems to run a knife down the length of my spine.

For the first time I think about stepping backward, into the raging water—but not because I want to die. I just don’t want to know why his eyes are suddenly like that. Not cold and still, but lost and frantically searching for something. Unable to turn my way. And then they do and that’s worse, it’s worse.

What if the cold void is the mask, and this is what’s real, I think.

About a second before he speaks in a voice that sounds like something haunted. “I remember all of the time I just spent with you, you know,” he says. “I have every memory some other man made with you. The man I was, the man I am, the man I can no longer be. Me, but with everything awful briefly emptied out. Like clean flesh underneath a rotten wound—oh, what a wonder that was. What a horror it is now,” he says, and I swear I try to tell him to stop. But all the words are suddenly stuck in my throat. And somehow, I don’t think he’d listen anyway. He’s almost talking to himself now. “I can hear you, you as you are now, telling me you love me. I can see your eyes all full of it, even before you spoke the words. See you through him, looking up at me with a million emotions I haven’t seen in your face for a millennium. Adoration, affection, love, wonder—oh, wonder, the worst one of all. To know it was there, but only because finding me good and worthy was a joyous revelation to you!”

He shakes his head, looks at the sky.

Somewhere in the middle of that last word, his voice goes high.