And there he was, Vince, running awkwardly towards them, left arm held across his stomach, and glancing back every few steps. He was different—his hair was much longer and he wore a straggly beard—but she could never not know him.

She tried to speak but it came out as a deep, violent gasp. Lilou held her up.

“Something’s chasing him,” Lilou said. “We need to be ready.”

“Ready with what?” she asked.

“Maybe ready with Sammi.”

Angela looked down at the girl sitting in the mud, pale and wan and worn out.

“Sammi,” she said.

“I heard.”

More banging came from beneath them. Angela didn’t like to think how little there was between her and the mad, infected Kin. They still knew so little about them, but the fact that they were dangerous was a certainty.

There’s Vince, she thought, and it was a moment she had never truly believed would happen. She had seen him countless times over the past couple of years in daydreams—laughing at her, flicking food, scowling, the two of them drinking and walking by a river and making love—but however much she had hoped, the idea of ever seeing him again had been a remote, foolish dream. She might as well wish after someone who was dead.

Now here he was, and Angela lost herself. She jumped from the wall and landed on the bank of silt built up against the cooler room. Her feet sank in and she rolled, standing again, running, ignoring Lilou’s shouts and Sammi’s weaker cries, because this was Vince, the man she loved and the other half of her in this world, and she would not spend another second without him if she didn’t have to. She had been incomplete for the past two years, her soul broken, and though Sammi had given her purpose she could never, ever fix her. Vince’s loss had been so traumatic that sometimes it had given her physical pain, and she’d examined her body for signs. Some forms of grief were so deep and powerful that they could damage the flesh.

“Vince!” she called, but her voice was stolen by her panting, gasping breath. She ran harder and he saw her, and she saw him try to call her name as well. He was in pain, but she would wrap him in her arms and make him better. Whatever he had been through there in the Fold with Grace and Mallian, whatever he had done to survive, she would make him better.

As the distance between them grew less she began to fear it was all a hallucination. She was seeing things, her mind tweaked and stirred by this strange place and these weird events, she was imagining Vince coming towards her.

Would I really imagine the ways he’s changed? The long straggly hair, bushy beard, drawn, thinner face? Could I really dream that desperate hope in his eyes?