Page 146 of The Threads Between

Images crashed through me, photographs on the wall, my sister older than six, a life that had continued instead of ending.

"I— no." Panic spiked through the relief. I could not face them yet. Not like this. Not when I was still wearing the dress I had worn to save the Weavers. Not when my hands still remembered the shape of August's face. "I'm okay," I said quickly, though nothing about me was okay. "I just . . . needed to hear your voice."

A small silence, not suspicious, not probing. Just thoughtful. The silence of a mother who knew when to push and when to wait.

"Well, you can hear it anytime," she said gently. "You don't have to go through things alone, you know. You never have."

Something inside my chest cracked open completely.

You never have.

In the life I remembered, I had. For years. For so long that loneliness had become a language I spoke fluently, a country I had learned to navigate without maps. But this version of me, the one who had grown up with her family intact, with her sister alive, with phone calls and dinners and ordinary love, this version had never known that country at all.

"I know," I whispered, tears slipping down my temples into my hair. "I know."

"Try to get some rest," she continued. "And call me later, alright? We're having dinner at the house tonight if you feel up to it. Your sister's been asking about you all week."

My sister. Alive. Waiting. Growing. Living in a future I had never expected to see.

"I will," I said, though my voice broke on the words. "I promise."

"Good. I love you, sweetheart."

My heart leaped towards the words. I had been starving for this without even knowing it.

"I love you too," I managed. "Um, Mum, you mean your house . . . our house, right?"

She laughed, that familiar, warm sound I had almost forgotten. "Lily, honey, what other house would we have dinner at?"

"Yeah, you're right," I said, trying to sound normal. Trying to sound like someone who had not just crossed a century. "I'm just tired."

"Get some sleep, honey. I'll see you later."

The line clicked softly as she hung up.

I stayed where I was on the floor, receiver still pressed to my ear, listening to the empty tone long after the call had ended. As if letting go would make her disappear again. As if this fragile, impossible reality might collapse if I moved too quickly, breathed too deeply, wanted too much.

Slowly, carefully, I returned the receiver to its cradle.

Silence rushed back in. But it was no longer the hollow silence of grief, the silence I had grown so accustomed to that I had forgotten it was not supposed to be home. This silence was different. Full. Alive. Pressed close on every side by things I had thought I lost forever.

My gaze drifted to the books scattered across the floor. To Ysella's name, repeated like a prayer. To Elowen's story, rising from the ashes of what should have destroyed her.

I pressed my palm against my sternum, searching for the thread that had once connected us across rooms and now stretched across years.

It was still there.

Faint. Distant. Thinned by time until it was barely more than a whisper. But unmistakably, impossibly, real.

Not broken. Not gone.

Somewhere, somehow, in a way that defied every law of time and death and reason, August Hawthorne still existed. Perhaps only in the bond that stretched between us like starlight, ancient, still traveling from a source that had burned out long ago.

I closed my eyes and let the tears fall. Grief and gratitude and love vast enough to drown in.

He was out there somewhere. In this new history, in the years between then and now, he had lived. He had breathed and worked and walked through decades I would never touch. And somewhere, in a photograph, a letter, a gravestone I had not yet found, there would be proof.

"I will find a way," I whispered into the morning light.