My face fell. Did those in heaven truly not know my fate?

“Myriam.” I lowered myself onto one knee before her, gripping her by the shoulders. “I haven’t a heart.”

“Yes, you have,” she replied, the smile returning to her lips, though sadder now than before. “Stephanie gave you one.”

I tilted my head at her, a hundred questions piercing my brain like so many arrows.

So. Myriam knew of Stephanie. My family. Could they see me from wherever their spirits now existed? Had they watched over me all along? From the beyond I had unwittingly sent them to?

Perhaps Myriam had not seen everything. Like the moments that had elapsed before I had arrived here—wherever here was. A dream that, this time, was not of my making.

“The rose—it was destroyed,” I told her. And I might have dreaded what this would mean for me. But I had already spent so long in purgatory that the prospect of more time in a realm of in-between held little horror for me.

“But you see,” said Myriam through a giggle. She took both of my hands in hers. “The rose—that rose. Brother, it never counted.”

“What are you saying?” I asked her. “Please. Speak plainly.”

“You’ve been lost so long,” she whispered, touching my cheek. “In a dark forest where all the trees were you.”

I touched her cheek in return just as the wind rushed up between us, carrying off her hat. As if I had never missed a moment between the last day I had seen her and this one, I rose immediately to go after it. But I was struck still and dumb by the sight that awaited me.

Two figures now stood in the distance.

Mother. Father.

Arm in arm, positioned exactly as they had been in their wedding photo, my parents watched me with their own matching set of sad smiles, their expressions far from condemning.

My mother waved. Taking hold of my sister’s hand, I started toward them.

My family. They had come. Despite what I was. What I had done.

I swallowed against the bitter taste of Myriam’s previous words. Her claim that I could not return home.

So then . . . what was to happen now?

“Erik.”

My sister came to a stop—forcing me to do the same. I wheeled around to look at her, panicked for the first time.

“You cannot come with us,” Myriam stated.

Hell. This was when she would tell me where I would go. The boy had been right. But could the devil do any worse than I had done to myself? It was true I had blighted my own existence. Yet I wanted it also to be true that Stephanie had winged me at last to release.

“Why?” I asked, fear and anger ripping through me anew. “Why can’t I?”

“Because.” Myriam stepped up to me, placing her warm hand over my sternum. “Your heart. Your true heart. It beats on.”

She shoved me. Lightly. But the small effort on her part was all it took to send my spirit floating back from hers. Up. Over and above the poppies.