But that didn’t really do anything about this trepidation. I knew that Pan was nervous that something bad might happen with Sunniva and the memory recovery, and he didn’t completely trust Jem-Kruk and Sumi.

Those are the things he’d told me, when he voiced his concerns the previous day. But I also suspected there was another silent fear lurking under everything: the fear that I wouldn’t come back. That I would go to Förening and stay, the way Rikky had done before.

That was the only way I could explain the way Pan kissed me after we said our goodbyes. Jem and Sumi had put the last of their things—they only had a few bags between the three of them—in the back of the Jeep while Eliana hugged Dagny.

“I’ll call you when I get there,” I told him as we stood by the driver’s side door in the warm morning sun.

And then suddenly, he grabbed me, pulling me to him, and he kissed me fiercely, deeply. It stole my breath away and made my knees weak. Fortunately, his arm around me stopped me from going full swoon.

When we stopped kissing, he rested his forehead against mine and breathed in deeply. “Come back to me, Ulla, safe and sound.”

“I’ll always come back to you,” I promised him.

I hadn’t told him what I’d seen in the memory—the two of us saying “I love you” to each other—or that I knew I loved him still. Just before I left didn’t seem like the right time, especially when we hardly had a moment alone.

So with that goodbye, I got in the Jeep and got on the road. Things took a bumpy turn right at the start, with Eliana and Sumi getting into a heated debate about what music to listen to, but they finally shut up when I put on Queen.

The drive was supposed to be split between two days, with us ending up in Bozeman, Montana, very late the first night, if we stayed on track, but Eliana was dead set against keeping to our schedule. She was an exuberant tourist. Everything that even remotely counted as sightseeing—including a very, very large tree and a woman giving away puppies at a gas station—she wanted to stop for.

When we were through a long, open stretch of road, she yelped in the back seat and slapped the window with the palm of her hand. “Look at them!”

I slammed on the brakes, only to see the danger Eliana was alerting me to was half a mile away. A pack of six silvery gray wolves raced through a grassy field that ran alongside a twisting shallow river.

Since the vehicle had stopped moving, Eliana opened the door and dove out.

“Eliana!” I shouted, and I turned the Jeep off, since there wasn’t another car around for miles.