Page 61 of 13 Nights

Sleepy Hollow on Halloween morning looks like a town that swallowed a costume shop and can't stop vomiting. Every storefront has a jack-o'-lantern display. Every lamppost is wrapped in fake cobwebs. The coffee shop on Beekman Avenue has renamed its latte "The Headless Horseman's Brew," and the sandwich board outside promises a free pumpkin cookie with every large, no purchase limit, while supplies last.

I stand on the sidewalk with a cup of mediocre coffee and watch a family of four pose for a photo beside a wooden Horseman cutout. The father lifts his youngest onto the painted horse. The kid grabs the Horseman's collar and grins. The mother frames the shot.

Nobody knows. The tourists, the vendors, the reenactors in their tricorn hats and plastic swords. Nobody in this town knows that the Horseman is a man named Severin von Brandt, that he is sleeping in my bed right now with a heartbeat that didn't exist two nights ago, and that tonight the curse that has held him for 250 years will finally break.

The kid on the wooden horse waves a foam sword at the sky. His mother tells him to smile.

I finish the coffee and walk back to the cottage.

Severin is still asleep when I let myself in. He sleeps motionless, as though even unconsciousness has learned not to disturb his control.

The exhaustion caught up with him around noon despite his refusal to admit it, and he went down on the bed with his boots still on and his argument still lodged between us. He hasn't moved.

I sit at my desk under the front window and begin the letters. Three of them, each in its own envelope, handwritten on the stationery I brought from Brooklyn because some things shouldn't be typed.

For the Marburg state archive, I lay out the documentary chain: the fabricated muster entry for Johann Brandt, the evidence identifying the actual conscript as Severin von Brandt, and the supporting documents. I include a request for formal review and correction of the regimental records.

For Tom, I write: Finish what your family began. Protect the truth—and my friend Lena Marchetti, whose number is in my phone—from whatever comes next. The deed and my mother's estate documents are in the desk. I want Lena to have the cottage.

For Lena, I write more. Where to find everything. The research is real, the evidence is sound, and the story is true. She'll think I've lost my mind. I tell her to read the documents before she decides.

I don't tell her goodbye. Goodbye is for the voice memo.

I set the envelopes beside the evidence folders and my mother's research. Then I pick up my phone, open the voice recorder, and press the red button.

"Lena."

I pause. The recorder counts seconds in the silence.

"You're going to be angry. You should be. I'd be angry too." I look at the window, at the October sun coming through the glass. "I'm leaving you a mess. The cottage, the research, a story that sounds certifiably insane. Everything is in the desk and on the kitchen table."

"There's a man. His name is Severin. He's been dead for 250 years, and he's asleep in the next room right now with a heartbeat and warm body on my sheets. I know how that sounds. I know exactly how that sounds."

I press my fingers against my eyes. "He is the best and the most impossible thing that has ever happened to me. Tonight I'm going to make a choice that I can't come back from. I am choosing this with my eyes open because the alternative is watching him walk into something alone, and I won't do that. I can't."

My voice holds. I'm proud of that.

"I'm not leaving because this life failed me. This life is good. You are the best part of it. The book contract matters. The career matters. You matter more than I've ever told you, and I should have told you that more often, and I'm sorry." My throat tightens but I keep recording. "I love you. Read the documents. And forgive me, if you can."

The recording stops. I set the phone beside the letters, screen up, volume on.

The house I've made into a home in less than three weeks looks the same as it did this morning. The desk with the good light. The kitchen where I make terrible coffee and he pretends it's adequate.

I let the grief be real. The cost is Lena's voice on the phone at midnight telling me I'm being ridiculous. The cost is the book I've been trying to write and the career I built from nothing. The cost is growing old, and every ordinary morning I'll never have.

All of it settles over me at the desk in the last of the October afternoon. Then I get up and start preparing for tonight.

The sun goes down just before six. I watch it from the kitchen window while Severin stands behind me, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from his body.

He runs warmer than he did three nights ago. The curse is burning itself out, and whatever fuel it's been using has turned him more alive with every hour.

"I won't let you follow me," he says.

"I know you believe that."

"This is not a negotiation."

"No," I agree. "It isn't."