Naturally, I began crying harder. “Get out of that mirror. I love you, too, and I want to kiss you.”

“I have a feeling we’ll have to wait a week or two while I reconstruct myself. Which is very irritating,” he replied, teeth clenched. “I’m used to instant gratification.”

I lifted the mirror off the wall and rested it on the couch. “We’ll pass the time by building suspense.”

And then he noticed the decorations left behind by Hall O’ween, so I had to explain that, along with everything else he missed (he asked me to turn on the Weather Channel and rotate his mirror). He told me what it’s been like to be outside his body, determined to return. We did a lot of staring at each other and calling each other’s faces perfect, sniffling, beaming, and finally laughing, because it was us against the universe and we won. We got to keep each other.

“Also.”

Then he revealed a folded slip of paper from his mirror-pocket. The words in the birth certificate were flipped backward in the glass, but I know him so well that I could have guessed, anyway.

“Hall Monica Bettie.”

“I thought I’d need some documentation. A forged birth certificate and ID, so that Cracker Barrel will hire me. They’re putting one of those in Springhedge, did you hear? A few well-placed whisperings in the ears of sleeping entrepreneurs has worked out nicely for me.”

“You gave yourself Bettie as a last name.”

“Of course!” That warmth I’d been missing began to radiate again, but this time it was radiating from me. I felt myself glowing from within, and I knew from the glimmer in his eyes that were almost all the way brown with only the thinnest band of green in his left, that my light had reached him. “It’s the best name I could think of. Bettie has all my favorite things in it.”

The following day, he left the mirror and appeared as a low-lying mist that hovered in my living room. Which was alarming for me but absolutely terrifying for the FedEx delivery man, who saw it all happen through the window and who now leaves my packages on the farthest step from the house.

Slowly, as the days of the new year passed, Hall absorbed more and more of the physical world and his form began to take shape. It was an arduous process that took all of his concentration, so I sat by quietly for moral support whenever I was at home and, to avoid distracting him, spent a lot of time at work or at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. He built up his matter out of his surroundings: he took the color of the coffee table for his irises, crafting his hands from the smoke of a candle. Piece by piece, Hall was reaccumulated, nearly identical to the old Hall but painstakingly constructed into a specimen that could not be easily wiped away by a magic clock ticking down to goodbye. He is no longer a feeling, a larger purpose. What he likes to say, whenever I ask him “What are you?”, is: