“But you wouldn’t be sad,” Lina argued. “You wouldn’t remember.”

Poe shook his head. “I’m with Dex. ‘Better to have loved and lost,’ as Tennyson said, ‘than to have never loved at all.’”

“Depends how you see it. Could be a kindness.” She patted Poe on the shoulder and wandered back behind the coffee counter. Reg and I locked eyes behind her back and held one of our silent conversations.

You hear that stuff about memory?

I’m sitting right here.

It’s like she knows about vampires.

Or she’s just crazy.

Oh, she’s definitely crazy.

Maybe it took a crazy person to think it was a kindness to erase someone you’d loved and lost from your memory. And maybe my dream of turning Sydney and Sophia immortal was selfish, even cruel. To make them forget their family, their friends . . .

My breath caught as I wondered if I’d had friends like this before—friends I had forgotten, wiped from my mind like cobwebs to be simply swept away.

The idea that Sydney and Sophia and Poe and even Dexter could be so easily erased made me uncomfortable. But at least I would always have Reg. Though, as I watched my brother leaning into Poe, hands still linked, faces close, the doubt I’d felt in the theater crept back in. Would Reg be as willing to sever these mortal ties?

I asked him as much on the way home, and he brushed me off with a nonanswer.

“We have time enough to worry about that.”

“But that’s the whole point, Reg! Time is running out.”

We stepped to the side of the road to make way for a passing car, a small cloud of exhaust creating a hazy view of a “No More, No Less” bumper sticker on the car’s rear end.

“Every day, every minute we are mortal, we are losing time,” I said. “Time is the entire curse of mortality. Time killed Sydney and Sophia’s aunt.”

“We are far from death.”

“We’re closer than we were a month ago.”

We reached the cottage mid-argument, dropping our bags on the kitchen floor and slinging our jackets over chairs. Sal grunted a greeting and gestured for us to clean up our mess.

“I’ll concede that point,” Reg said, moving his coat and bag to their proper, tidy spot. “But worrying over something you can’t control will only hurry those human wrinkles.”

My hands went instinctively to my face, and he grinned, casually amused in that infuriating way only Reg could be. But just behind that grin I saw a small flicker of doubt, a crack in my brother’s cool facade. It was there and gone in an instant, and when he spoke, there was no trace of it, his tone as self-assured as ever.

“Whatever happens, at least we’ll face it together.”

“What if nothing happens? What if they turn us down? What if—”