“But why are we back here, Kane? You have all this power, so why are we in Helena’s reverie?” Adeline asked.

“Because they deserve a second chance.”

In the fresh, white sunlight, Elliot and Ursula were easy to find. They rushed through the crowd in a mixture of celebration and confusion. Ursula reached Kane first, embracing him over the wide hoop of her grand pink dress. Elliot, because he was Elliot, immediately started scheming about how they would outsmart the reverie.

“I saw Helena. She’s here. But she’s not young anymore. She’s just wandering around in her normal clothes.”

“Relax, Elliot. It’s okay. I’ve got this,” Kane said. He closed his eyes and let his mind hover over the depths of the crown, holding himself away from its evil entrapment. Careful as he could, he coaxed out Maxine Osman.

Like a sun rising right before them, her reverie came forth as Kane ushered her from the crown’s prison. The lush garden and the gazebo turned vivid in her watercolors, accepting the shift without resistance. If anything, the two reveries merged in a way that made them impossible to imagine separated.

“We’re righting a wrong,” Kane said. He moved them back as the crowd gathered around Maxine, murmuring about her strange clothes and the watercolor brushes she still held. Then the crowd parted, and there was Helena, in the gazebo. She wore her little yellow sweater and her orthopedic sneakers. She blinked at the bright colors, as though her vision had just been restored to her after a long time in darkness.

“Max?” Helena whispered.

Maxine clutched her brushes. Her aloof confidence from Kane’s brief conversation in the river was gone. She was fully present now, shaking as she looked at the person she had been waiting for.

The painter and the heiress joined together in a kiss that spared nothing on shame, for they were in their own world now, a haven of their own making, guarded against twists by Kane’s own exertion. He pushed as much perfection into the reveries as he could muster. He filled the honeyed air with weightless petals. He filled their fists with the thin necks of champagne flutes. He raised his arm and every arm raised with him, toasting Helena and Maxine as they stood in the gazebo, talking so softly that their words were lost behind swelling, joyous music.

Dean took Kane’s free hand and kissed his temple, where the crown still gripped.

“Why this? Why here?” he asked.

“It’s a resolution,” Kane told him. “After everything we put these two through, they deserve a happily ever after.”

Per usual, Dean’s eyes were on the deep distance. They were back to their sea-foam green.

“But this is a reverie. It can’t last forever.”