Mom wouldn’t have wanted me kneeling at her headstone crying. She would have wanted me smiling and happy—all the things I’d found it so much easier to be when she was around. Now, even though the two of us were close again, she remained unreachable. Cold and alone. Just where we’d left her before Dad had uprooted us to one city after another.

Poor Charlie. Moving around was all she’d ever known.

Charlie. I missed her so much, too—and Dad. Where were they now? I must have come back here, to New York, without either of them.

And what was I doing here anyway? How had I even entered the cemetery?

Shifting into a sitting position, I propped my jeans-clad knees up and wrapped my arms around them.

“Mom, I’m lost,” I murmured. “And I know that must be why I’m here now. Except . . . I can’t remember where I went wrong. Or if I’m too late to fix it.”

No answer came from anywhere, none but the hiss of the snow—a sound I’d heard before and recently. One that now caused my skin to prickle and my pulse to race.

Turning my head, I laid my cheek against my knees, my focus shifting from my mother’s simple marker to another, more elaborate one. An old stone figure’s hooded form stood sentinel over another grave, poised atop a plinth with its head dipped low, its hood draped forward to shield the face I couldn’t be certain the statue even had.

And that was somehow familiar, too.

Sniffing, I pushed once more to my feet, stepping in the direction of the other grave, certain that if I cleared the snow covering its plaque, I would know the name inscribed there, too.

Before I could touch the stone, though, I froze, arrested by the whispered sound of my name.

I hesitated, afraid of who I would find there when I turned. With a scrape of my heel on the stone pathway, I spun—and started.

“Lucas?”

The sight of him standing there in the snow without a coat or scarf, the moon glinting off the lenses of his black-framed glasses, caused everything to come rushing back to me. All at once, I understood exactly how I’d gotten here. And where here really was.

“I’m dreaming,” I said to him. “This . . . is a dream.” I laughed a little to myself. Then the tears started again, streaming too hot down my cold face. Because while it would have been an act of kindness for Erik to send me here after what I’d shared with him, it struck me as unbearably cruel of him to bring Lucas into this. No doubt this was a trick. Erik’s way of mocking me over our bargain. Or was he seeking revenge because I’d stolen his mask?

“It’s a dream, but it’s real,” Lucas said, his tone hushed, like he was trying to convince himself as well as me. “Or . . . I am.”