“I know,” he smiles. “The entire session was me trying not to tell her things that could get me kidnapped.”

We get serious.

“How are you?” he asks cautiously. I appreciate the way he’s tiptoeing around my feelings, but we are a little too crushed for such gentle sentiments. For the first time, I answer him.

“Shitty.”

The corner of his mouth turns up. Just one corner. It’s his trademark.

“That’s better than being closed off, I guess,” he says.

I feel emotion rush me—the intimacy, the awkwardness. I want to revolt against it, but I don’t. It takes an awful toll on a person to fight down everything they’re feeling. Elgin tried to tell me that once. The bitch.

“I heard about your prognosis…”

“I’m okay with it,” I say quickly. “It just … is.”

He looks like he has a million things to say, and he can’t.

“I wanted to come see you, Senna. I just didn’t know how.”

“You didn’t know how to come see me?” I ask, partially amused.

He looks at my eyes, in them. So sadly.

“It’s okay,” I say, slowly. “I get it.”

“What do we do now?” he asks. I don’t know if he’s asking how we are supposed to live, or how we are supposed to finish this conversation. I don’t ever know what to do.

“We live then we leave,” I say. “Do the best we can.”

He runs his tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. It puffs out and settles back down. It reminds me of when you’re baking a cake and you open the oven too early. I toy with the jagged edges of my hair, glancing up at him every so often.

“Are things good? With you and Daphne?” I have no right to ask him, none at all. Especially considering that everything Elgin did was because of me.

“No,” he says. “How can they be?” He shakes his head. “She has been supportive. I can’t complain there, but it was like they gave me a month and then they wanted the old me back. They being my family,” he tells me. “But I don’t know how to be him. I’m different.”

Isaac was always so honest with his emotions. I wish I could be like that. I feel as if I need to say something.

“I don’t have anyone to disappoint,” I confess. “I don’t know if that makes it easier or harder.”

He looks startled. His black scrubs wrinkle as he leans toward me. “You’re loved,” he says.

Love is a possession; it’s something that you own from the layers of people in your life. But if my life were a cake it would be un-layered, unbaked, missing ingredients. I isolated myself too soundly to own anyone’s love.

“I love you,” says Isaac. “From the moment you ran out of the woods, I’ve loved you.”

I don’t believe him. He’s a nurturer by profession and by person. He saw something broken and needed to heal it. He loves the process.

As if reading my thoughts he says, “You have to believe someone sometime, Senna. When they tell you that. Otherwise you’ll never know what it feels like to be loved. And that’s a sad thing.”

“How do you know?” I ask, brimming with anger. “It’s a big deal to say those words. How do you know that you love me?”

He pauses for a long time. Then he says, “I was offered a way out.”

“A way out? A way out of what?” But I spit that out too soon. It’s like a stone that drops between us. I wait for the thud, but it never comes because my brain loses its footing and the room tips and turns.

“What do you mean?”

“On the morning after we opened the door, I found a note in the shed with sleeping pills and a syringe. It said that I could leave. All I had to do was put you to sleep, inject myself, and I would wake up at home. The stipulations were that I could never talk about you. Not to police, not to anyone. I had to tell them that I had an emotional breakdown and ran away. If I told anyone about you, she said she would kill you. If I left you there, I could go home. I threw them over the side of the cliff.”

“Oh my God.”

I stand but my legs can’t hold me. I sit again, burying my face in my hands. Saphira, what have you done?

When I look up, my soul is in my face, twisting my features. It’s angry and sad.

“Isaac. Why would you do that?” My voice cracks. I know why Saphira did it. She knew he wouldn’t leave me. She knew eventually he would tell me, and that in telling me, I would see everything clearly. I would see…

“Because I love you.”

My face goes slack.

“I didn’t leave you because I couldn’t. I’ve never been able to.” There is a pause and then, “Not unless you make me go. And if I’d known you better back then, I wouldn’t have left you. I thought it was what you needed. But you didn’t know yourself. I knew you. You needed me, and I let you push me out. And for that I’m very sorry.”

He presses his lips together, and the vein in his head pops.

“I got another chance, too,” he says. “She gave me another chance not to leave. So I took it.”

“Are you saying Saphira—”

“I’m not saying anything about Saphira,” he cuts me off. “She did what she did. We can’t change that. Life happens. Sometimes crazy people kidnap you and make you a part of their personal psychological experiment.”

The noise that comes from my throat is part laugh, part groan.

“She wanted to see what love would do if put to the test.”

Love doesn’t leave. It bears all things.

I don’t know why Saphira wanted to test love. If it was to show me something, or to show herself. I wonder about that. Who she was. Who the man who built the house was to her. But she played with our lives, and I hate her for that. Isaac missed his daughter’s birth, months of her life because of what Saphira did. We almost died because of what she did. But it changed me. The change that Isaac started, before I filed a restraining order to keep him out, Saphira Elgin finished in that house in the snow.

A part of me is grateful to her, and it makes me feel sick to admit that.

Chapter Forty-Three

On the day I am scheduled to leave, I find a brown envelope on my windshield. I briefly think that I received a parking ticket somewhere, and failed to notice it until now. But when I lift my wiper and pull it away the paper is crisp, not something that’s been sitting outside in the wet, Seattle air. It’s also heavyish. My universe tilts. I spin in a circle looking for him in the trees and down the driveway. I know he’s not here. I know that. But he was, and I can feel him.

Everything is boxed up in my house, including my sound system, so I turn the car on and push the silver disc into the car radio. It has just started to snow, so I open all of the windows and blast my heat so I can have the best of both worlds. I hit play, and hold on to the steering wheel. I’m about to careen off a cliff. I know it.

I can hardly breathe as I listen to the last song that Isaac will ever give me. I listen to it while my breath freezes and smokes into the air.

And while snow flies into the car windows.

And while my heart beats, and then aches, and then beats.

I listen to my soulmate’s heart with saltwater seeping out of my eyes. He’s speaking to me through a song. Like he always has. It’s a hard thing to know that I’m never going to see him again or hear his music, which woke me up from a long, restless sleep. The shadows still chase me. And I know that when I wake up in the middle of the night screaming, he won’t be there to climb in bed behind me and command them away with the complex way he loves me. The song crushes me. Our cosmic love, our cosmic connection.

Nick was wrong about me. Having a mud vein didn’t kill me; it saved me. My vein drew Isaac. He was the light and he followed me into the darkness. He became the darkness, then he carried my burdens so I wouldn’t have to. Isaac saved me from myself, but in the end, no one could save me from cancer.

I’m terminal. That’s a funny word. Cancer can kill my body, but it can’t kill me. I have a soul. I have a soulmate. We are vapors; here today and gone tomorrow. But before tomorrow comes I want to see color—the color threaded throughout Italy and France and Sweden. I want to see the Northern Lights. And when I die, I know there will be an invisible red thread connecting me to my soulmate. It can tangle, and it can stretch, but it can never break. When I die, I’ll be in the light. And someday Isaac will find me, because that’s what he is.

I put the letter in my mailbox and flip the little red flag up.

Dear Isaac,

I finally understand your tattoos. I never voiced how much they bothered me, but sometimes in that house in the snow, you’d catch me looking and I’d see the hidden smile on your face. You knew I was trying to work it out. When I asked you about it, you told me that we were all bound by something because we needed something to hold us together. What you wrap around your soul determines your outcome—that’s what you said to me. But I didn’t get it. I though that was crazy, until the day you held my hand, clamped over a knife, and pointed it at your body: both of us cutting into your skin.

You bore my burdens that hour. Does that make sense? You took my self-loathing and bitterness, my promise to pay back the world, and you pointed them at yourself. I loved you then. Because you saw me. It’s the very instance that I woke up from a blinding, and knew that I was standing face to face with my soulmate. A concept I didn’t believe in until your soul healed mine. The darkness that formerly commanded me yielded to your light. That’s how I understood your tattoos. The ropes that bound me were no longer self-loathing and bitterness. They suddenly became you, but in a good way. I need those ropes to hold me together. I didn’t want to hurt myself anymore because it hurt you.

Oh, God. I’m rambling. I just needed you to know.

Every minute you spent getting to know me, I got to know me. Forgive me for not recognizing our soul-likeness sooner, while we still had time. The nature of love is that it conquers. Hate. Even bitterness. Mostly, it conquers self-loathing. I was sitting in a white room hating myself, until you breathed life back into me. You loved me so much that I started to love myself.

Who would have thought that day that I was running out of the woods, I was running straight into the arms of my savior? Right out of an ugly life that had me conquered. I did not choose you, and you did not choose me. Something else chose for us. The snow covered me, and you covered me, and in that house—in pain, and cold, and hunger—I accepted unconditional love. You are my truth, Isaac, and you set me free.

We are all going to die, but I’m going to die first. In the very last second of my life, I will think of you.

Senna