I folded my arms, doing my best to keep my expression impassive. To wear my own mask. So, apparently, he didn’t have an answer for what was happening to his world. Only that it was something he was experiencing, too.

“What makes you so sure it can only end badly?” I asked. “The heart. It . . . stopped whatever was happening last night.”

“I warned you yesterday,” he said. “It won’t hold. For me, no false heart ever has. And this intermingling of our spirits. As beautiful—as blissful—as it is, can it not be assumed that the inevitable consequences can only match in severity?”

I frowned at him, both baffled at his words and able to see his reasoning.

Why did that hurt so much?

“I am here before you now against my better judgment,” he went on without further prompting. “While I wish I could say that I have come to prepare you for whatever will transpire next, I can lie to you no more. And so I will tell you that I have returned simply because the misery of missing you has, at last, outweighed the pain that comes with being in your presence.”

I couldn’t have hidden my shock if I’d wanted to. Because those words, simultaneously as ardent as they were devastating, couldn’t have come from Zedok. Only Erik could have said such a thing to me.

“Would the pain be any more to bear,” I heard myself whisper, “if you let me go?”

“Stephanie—”

“I would come back,” I hurried to say. And maybe, possibly, I even meant it.

“It’s not—”

“I miss my family.” I started down the stairs toward him. “I miss Charlie and my father. They’re gone because I am. And I know they’re not going to come back until I do. They need me. Erik, please.”

“You don’t understand.” Turning, he headed into the parlor. I went after him, stopping in the doorway while he went to the fireplace. With one gloved hand, he picked up the ticking mantel clock.

“This was once my father’s,” he said. “Every hour of every day, it reminds me of him. Stephanie, it eats at me. Erodes the fractals of my soul the way sand devours a forgotten relic.”

Stepping back from the mantel, he hurled the clock into the hearth with sudden violence, the shattering of glass and the cracking of wood making me jump.

Next, he crossed to a short table stacked with books, which he kicked over. Then, turning, he stormed toward me.

I held both my breath and my ground, fearful I’d be the next target on his tirade. But he merely took me by the hand, something he’d never done since bringing me here.

“Listen,” he said as he pulled me out with him into the hall again, his bony fingers dropping mine the instant we’d passed fully into the foyer. “Do you hear it?” He pivoted to face me, standing closer than he had ever dared to come on his own outside of a dream.