Winterwood

I don’t answer, and I pull my arm away from him—afraid to tell him what I think. Afraid to say that even if he doesn’t remember it, he might have killed a boy. And that this single thing might destroy everything.

“I didn’t want to be there that night,” he tells me, his voice tiptoeing around each word.

“But you were,” I say.

He shakes his head and looks back at the sky, a waning moon peeking out from clouds, blurring the stars around it. Devouring them.

Oliver bites down on the words before he says them, and they come out bitter and clenched. “And what happened can’t be taken back,” he says. The wind kicks up over the lake, sending spires of white rising into the air.

“If it was an accident, like the others said, then it was no one’s fault,” I offer, trying to make everything okay. Not as bad as it seems.

“You don’t understand, Nora,” he says, swallowing hard and turning to look at me. “It wasn’t an accident. They knew what they were doing.”

A river of cold spikes down my center. “Who?” I ask.

“All of them.”

“They wanted Max dead?”

Oliver is quiet—midnight quiet, tiptoe quiet—and I ask, “Do you remember what happened now?” Is this why he’s standing out here on the roof, watching for the boys? Because his memories have returned? Because he recalls each moment out on that lake, with Max and the others?

He uncrosses his arms, slow and deliberate. “It’s too late now anyway. We can’t undo what’s been done.” His chest rises with each breath, his flat green eyes so wretchedly deep and dark that I feel drawn to him again. And even though there is disquiet in him—doubt and fear and fury, for the things he won’t say—I could also reach up on my tiptoes and press my lips against his. I could blot out his thoughts, the worry set deep in his eyes. I could blot out everything, take it from him and swallow it down and make it untrue. I am a Walker, and I should be able to do this one thing. A simple, singular thing: take a memory, take a death—and make it right.

But I can’t undo it. And I don’t lean forward and kiss him under the weight of the sallow moon. I stare at him and wait for him to speak. And when he does, it’s like vinegar and salt, a wound that will never heal. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, his eyes sloped down at the edges.

“You won’t,” I say. As if I can be sure.

He looks back into the trees, and dread burrows into the marrow of my bones, writhing inside me like shipworms making tunnels in my flesh.

He shakes his head—he doesn’t believe me. “I don’t want you to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” I tell him. But I know that I am, a wretched knot of fear growing in my gut. I’m scared to trust him, to let this flutter inside my chest become a hammer that will smash me apart. We love painfully, Mom always says. With our whole hearts. But we bruise easily too. She has always been afraid of her own careless heart, of past mistakes, of what she really is. And I don’t want to be like her: cynical and fearful and full of more doubt than anything else.

Oliver steps closer to me, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but his hand touches mine instead. “You’re shaking,” he says.

My body trembles, the cold sapping what little warmth is left inside me. But I say, “I’m fine.”

He squeezes my hand and pulls me to him, my head against his chest, his breath in my hair. He holds me to him and I want to cry—as if this will be the last time. “We need to get you inside,” he says. But I don’t want to, I want to stay out here with him and let the cold turn me to stone.

Still he pulls me back to the window, my muscles too weak to resist, and he lifts me up, placing me back through the open window into the loft.

My legs shake, and I crawl into bed, pulling the blankets up to my chin, while he shuts the window with a thud and locks it in place. As if to keep out the things we fear the most.

“Will you stay here with me?” I ask when he starts to move toward the stairs—my voice shaking. “Please.”

I don’t want to be alone, in this awful dark. With my skin like ice. I touch the place on my finger where my grandmother’s ring used to sit, feeling stripped bare without it. My accidental offering to the lake—just like the miners who used to drop things into the water to calm the trees.

Oliver looks back, his eyes coursing with something I don’t understand. A battle inside him. He wants to stay here with me, but he’s also afraid of what he might do. Or what he might say. He’s constructed an armor around himself, stone and metal and painful memories. Before, there was only confusion in his eyes—the void of what he had forgotten. Now, there is a wall of shadows. Tall and wide.

Still, he nods and crosses the room to lie beside me.

Maybe he doesn’t want to be alone either.