I can’t pinpoint the moment those hands leave me. It happens so slowly, so fuzzily, that I wonder if time has been manipulated. If he pressed pause on it for a few minutes. Or, I think, as doubt begins to seep in along with how perfectly ordinary my surroundings seem, maybe I imagined the whole experience.

“Come back,” I whisper hoarsely, pleading with the stars winking over the mountains. “Please. Make my wish come true.”

He doesn’t come back.

My breaths escape me in shuddering plumes. My limbs are shaking, teeth chattering against each other. It was him. He was here. I know it.

I scour the sky for any hint of him, but all is as it was. Nothing else is out there.

He was here, he was here.

But where did he go?

I swallow, throat burning, and walk on trembling legs back to the bench. I wrench off my skates, noticing that a breeze has fluttered the poetry book open as I yank on my boots.

Tucking windblown hair behind my ear, I flip the book right side up. The fifth page, which had been obstinately stuck to the back of the fourth one, contains a poem I haven’t yet read. It smells of spilled peppermint hot chocolate, the paper crinkled and warped, rough at its rises and soft in the valleys. My eyes dance from left to right, at this new fragment of Hall that’s taken form right when I thought I’d gotten the very last of him.

What I See

Some of your mischief is disguise

All the granite is for show

I’ve seen the way it leaves you

when

we’re standing all alone

The fire that flickers in your eyes

makes me burn up in the cold

You’ll laugh and say, “Oh Hall,”

but you

are softer than you know

My gaze lifts to the stars again, no longer wondering where Hall went.

He went, quite clearly, back into everything.

To where he’s always been. Standing by, giving cheer, twinkling in the streetlights, the snow, turning the mundane into the magical. Most of the sadness in my heart is for him, who can’t participate, who can only give and never take. Or he takes from what he gives, I suppose: deriving pleasure from pleasing.

I press a hand to my mouth, scanning for shadows, for wherever Hall might be, because I want him to see that I’m going to be all right, that I won’t fall apart. What if it breaks his heart to see me heartbroken? I couldn’t bear that.

He’s everywhere, though. When I trudge home and close the front door behind me, the noise sounds like his voice, urgent, quiet: Bettie. When I twist the tap of the bathroom sink to wet my toothbrush, the falling water sounds like Even ten minutes. Which I am certainly imagining, because even ten minutes doesn’t make any sense. Ten minutes until what? But the water gurgles out that exact same sound again, just as I shut it off: It goes down the drain in a mystifying even ten minutes.