I nearly lost my voice over the next few weeks. I hummed that hymn so many times, I was hearing it in my sleep. But despite my persistent humming, I couldn’t get the eye to come back. I sang, and sang, and sang, until I hurled the Volume of Wisdom against the wall of my bedroom and shouted at the sky, “I can’t be away anymore!” After a moment of listening to my own breathing, I dropped to the carpet, chest heaving, hands shaking. “Elowin, can’t you bring me back?”

The warm air began to cool in the evenings, and a crisp autumn crept in. I felt unusual sensations: frost on my knuckles, even while I was holding a piping hot coffee, and cool wind on my cheeks while laying in bed and staring at the ceiling fan. The familiar, hollow hunger began to spread through my chest; the yearning for a part of me that was missing; something that nothing in the Trite world could satisfy. I understood why Zane had been so determined to keep us on the same side of the intersect. When the ache was the heaviest, I wondered if he felt it too.

After my failed attempts to get the eye back, I entertained the theory that maybe sleep deprivation was to blame for it appearing in my coffee in the first place. It wasn’t unrealistic to assume my own eyes were sending false signals to my brain. Grandma had warned me that I’d start to lose my mind if I didn’t get some sleep. But what my family didn’t realize was that I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to.

The eye reappeared in October.

I jerked to a halt when I noticed the golden iris hovering in the jeweler’s window downtown. I blinked, worried it was my imagination. I leaned in to look at it, and I poked it. The eye jerked back and let out a muffled snarl. My jaw dropped.

Where the eye had just been, a peephole remained. I sprang forward, flattening my hands against the jeweler’s window, and I stood on my tiptoes to see through.

A glittering, blue tent was on the other side, with star-shaped wind chimes. Through the open tent-flap I spotted other tents—some glittering and some striped, a white dancing monkey, and brilliant, chalky clouds of colour amidst it all. I could hear faint, metallic tunes from the glass stars clapping together in the navy tent. But before I could stick my finger through, the hole vanished and only the Fall Sale sign in the jeweler’s window remained.

I drifted away from the window, my hands falling to my sides.

Striped tents.

Dancing monkeys.

“A circus,” I whispered.

I looked down the street to see if anyone else had spotted the eye, even though I had a pretty good idea they hadn’t. My gaze fell on a familiar lamppost at the end of the sidewalk by the old, boarded-up breakfast diner. The bulb had died out for good last year and no one had bothered to replace it.