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It takes him what feels like an age to explain.

And when it comes it’s halting. “I asked him to take it so I could follow you across time,” he says. Almost ashamed—though I don’t know why. I think it might be the most beautiful and heartbreaking thing I’ve ever heard. The sort of words you might read in a book, and be bereft that they will never exist in real life. In real life, nobody follows you for a thousand years, just hoping that this time you will hear them. That this time, you will love them again.

The very idea makes me sob into my hand. It makes me speechless.

I only find my voice when he tries to reassure me. His hand reaches for me and I can’t stand it, I can’t. “And you never stopped to wonder how you couldn’t convince me, even with a deed so lovely in you? You never wondered why on earth I couldn’t see how incredible that was?” I ask, because of course it’s plain as day. If he had told me, and I was able to listen, I would have heard. I would have understood the way I understand right now. It has to be magic.

But he still doesn’t get it.

“I just wasn’t worthy, love. I couldn’t say it right, I could never put it in such earnest words like the ones he had for you. I can hear the man I once was in my head and still I cannot speak the words in the way he would. I hear love in the back of my throat and fear how clumsily it will come out. I’m so cold now—who could fault you for finding that my words fall short?”

“So how can I hear you now? How can I believe you so quickly now?”

“I don’t know. The good version of me must have made it easier somehow.”

You fucking fool, I think.

Because the answer is obvious.

“Or you were cursed, Sten. You were cursed. It was very, very clearly a fucking curse. What else could it have been when I can hear you now. I can believe you now.” I throw up my hands. Try to walk away and can’t. I have to come back when every other thing comes together in my head. “When we stripped your memories we removed whatever hateful spell was there to stop me seeing. And so I saw. So it took ten fucking seconds to love you again—it wasn’t just the softness and the kindness, it was like calling to like. My soul calling to yours. My soul knew yours. Can’t you see that? I need you to see that.”

I get hold of his jacket then.

I shake him, just a little.

But when he goes to speak, all that comes out is a faint breath.

So I keep going—softer now, softer. “All I could see once whatever this curse was lifted is my soulmate, who crossed time to be with me. Oh, you searched for me for a thousand years. Stayed true even though it must have seemed like I could never love you. Kept going even when I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t trust you, couldn’t believe a thing you said. Saw everything you did as cruelty. Dear god, how did you keep saving me when everything I saw was cruelty?” I ask, and I’m weeping when I do.

I press my face to his chest for just a second.

And this is my reward for it.

“I would sooner dwell in your darkness than live in any other light,” he whispers, so faint I shouldn’t be able to hear it over the roar of the waves. But of course I do, I do. It makes me sag against him with a sob in my throat. But it’s all right, it’s all right, he catches me. He holds me. And eventually, finally, he manages to say more. Full of fear, and longing, and love.

“Does this mean you’re not going to walk into the ocean? Maybe you can hear me now when I say that strikes terror into my heart. I do not care if you cannot love me, only that you can understand when I ask, please do not end your life. Whatever you think of me, you must go on living. Please, for once, go on living,” he says, and it’s lovely and beautiful.

But it’s also foolish in its own way.

“How could I not, now I know the world is not lost,” I say.

And he still asks, “What makes you think so?”

So I tell him, I tell him.

“You are with me, again, at last.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I tell him I am too tired to fly back home, that I will get a hotel. And when I do I’ll admit—I picture him with me in one. Maybe not in that way, maybe not doing anything that would unsettle my soul even further than it already has been. But I can see it clearly anyway. Glowing lamps, an embroidered bedspread, stained glass in the tops of the windows. Like when I was Mathilde, only without the disbelief we were cursed with. He won’t have to turn himself into rats and run over my feet.

Because I won’t want to run him off this time.

We can do it all over again but better, I think.

And want to cry. Maybe I even would, if he didn’t try to do those better things right now. He says, “Can I take you in my arms?” And I think I say yes in a dazed-sounding voice that doesn’t seem like my own, and then he just scoops me up. One hand over the backs of my legs and one around my waist, and then off the ground so fast I make a little sound. I instinctively go to grab him around the shoulders.

I don’t even feel awkward about it.