“Good-bye, Simon,” I said. He had tucked the little pouch under his shirt again, out of sight. Each of us wore our memories of what might have been.

As I turned away he said, “How can he do this? If you were mine, I would fight to keep you. I would die, before I let you go.” Then Liam called out from down by the water, “Hurry up, Sorcha! We’re almost ready.”

The moment was finally here. Red waited, a still figure on the rocks, his gaze turned on the distant horizon. The gulls screamed overhead. This was a different cove, but the memories still lingered, of that other day. Somehow, I was standing before him, and we looked at each other. Looked at each other, and there might have been no world, save for the two of us. I could find no words. Not a single one. The Fair Folk had warned me my path would be hard. But nothing could have prepared me for something as hard as this. Red, too, was silent. It had been easier for us to understand one another when I had had no voice. Looking at him, I could see how his face might be, when he grew old. A face marked by grooves and lines, where his tears would have flowed, had he allowed himself to weep. His eyes were empty.

“Come on, Sorcha!” yelled Diarmid.

I can’t go. I must go. I blinked back tears, unable to move from where I stood.

“I almost forgot,” said Red. His voice sounded very strange, as if from a long, long distance. He reached into his pocket. “I have something for you.”

He put it into my hand. A round, shiny, perfect apple, green as new grass with a faint blush of rosy pink. And now his eyes had changed so that I saw what lay there, hidden deep, so deep only the bravest or most foolhardy would seek to find it.

He had always understood me better, without words. So I laid my hand on my heart, held it there for a moment, and then moved it over and touched my palm against his breast. My heart. Your heart.

“Come on, Sorcha, we haven’t got all day!” Padriac shouted.

I turned away, just before the tears began to well in my eyes and spill down my cheeks, and I ran to the boat and was hauled over the side. They pushed it forward, and the wind and waves took us and began to carry us westward, westward over the sea and home to Sevenwaters. And I sat with the apple in my hands, and my eyes fixed on the shore, where he stood like a man carved in stone. Tears blurred my vision, but still I looked back, until all I could see of him was the small bright flame of his hair against the gray and green and white of the shore line. All that he had of her was his memory, where he held every moment, every single moment that she had been his. That was all he had, to keep out the loneliness. But Red would forget. Now that I was gone, he could begin to forget. As for my own heart, it had been torn in two, and I did not think even the best healer in the world could mend it.