Page 89 of Haunt Me

“Say it anyway. I need to hear it again.”

“The path is his to walk.”

The same words The Light gave me the night it first came for me, the night I bargained for this half-life instead of whatever came after. I’d hoped, foolishly, that hearing it again might soften it somehow. Might help me to understand something more. But it doesn’t. It only confirms what I already know. Nothing about this has changed since the day I died, and nothing is going to.

“He’s not walking it,” I say. “He’s being dragged and beaten. I can feel every second of it happening through a thread that was supposed to be a gift. It isn’t, though. It’s a punishment.”

“A thread pulled taut still holds. That is the nature of a thing worth holding.”

“He wants to die.”

The words leave me before I can stop them. They’re the truest and ugliest things I’ve said since I got here.

“He wants to find me so badly he’s stopped fighting the men trying to end him. What kind of gift is this thread if all it does is let me feel him give up?”

The Light is quiet for a long moment, and in the quiet the wrongness on the other end of the thread pulses again, dimmer now, like he’s given up a little bit more.

“A seed does not know it is dying when it breaks open in the dark. It only knows the shell is gone.”

“I don’t want riddles. I want you to tell me how to save him.”

“This is still his to survive. Not yours.”

I hate that it’s right. I stayed because leaving Samuel behind felt like a second death, one I chose instead of one that chose me. I stayed because some stubborn, foolish part of me believed that our love should count for something. That it should be enough to bend a rule or two.

It isn’t. It never was. That’s the answer The Light keeps giving me, dressing it up with different words each time, but underneath it always has the same shape.

Never.

Not this. Not that. Not yet. Not ever.

When I was still alive, I thought grief was the worst thing I’d ever feel. I was wrong. This is worse—this particular flavor of helplessness. Of watching someone I love bleed in a place I can’t reach, armed with nothing but the ability to feel every second of it happen, but not being able to change a single thing.

“Then let me go,” I say, quieter now. “If I can’t help him, let me leave. Stop making me watch him choose this.”

The Light is silent long enough that I think, for a wild second, that it might actually do as I asked.

“Is that what you want?”

And there it is. The real question. The one I don’t have an honest answer for, because the truth is uglier and more selfish than I want to admit even here, even now, even to something that already knows exactly what’s inside me.

I don’t want to leave. Not really. Not yet.

I need Samuel to survive what’s happening to him tonight, even if surviving it means he keeps wanting, for a while longer, to be anywhere but alive. I want to still exist in whatever useless way I’m allowed, close enough to feel the shape of his life even if I can’t touch it.

Close enough that if he ever does stop wanting to die, I’ll be here for it. I don’t know what that makes me. Selfish, maybe? Or just still, after everything, a woman in love with a man I have no right to keep haunting, holding onto a thread that hurts more tonight than it ever has, and refusing, still, to let it go.

“No,” I admit. “That’s not what I want.”

“Then you already know why you’re still here.”

“Tell me he’ll survive tonight. Just tonight. I’m not asking for the whole path, only the next mile of it.”

“I do not tell rivers where they end. I only remind them that the sea has always been waiting.”

I don’t know what that means. I don’t think I’m meant to, not yet, not the way I want to. But something about The Light, patient and enormous and entirely unbothered by my terror, makes the thread ease, just slightly. As if even it understood there was mercy folded somewhere inside the words I couldn’t parse.

The Light doesn’t leave the way it arrives, all at once. Instead, it fades, the way dusk fades into darkness. Once again, I’m alone with the wrongness still tearing at the edges of wherever Sam is, unable to do a single thing except keep feeling it.