“There’s still only one hunter. He just has a different face. I wanted to keep up the ruse. Live the time we had left. You’d be on the run after that from a new hunter, but you’d be alive. I knew you could outsmart any killer coming in cold. But you wouldn’t accept that. You became obsessed with finding a way to get out from under the eyes of the Scions. I was so tired of the entire thing. Talking every day about a death sentence I wanted to forget. It was all you talked about. We forgot how to live, to remember that we were happy, right then. And we fought.

“You felt betrayed—even more than the day I told you what I was—that I seemed willing to settle for the time we had left. In my mind, being with you as long as I could was more than I could ask for. And more than I felt I honestly deserved. But you felt like I was giving up.”

“So I found a way to die,” I say.

“You were convinced it was our only option. But I was afraid. That something like we had was already a miracle and couldn’t be done twice in this life. That you wouldn’t want me again. That I couldn’t win you again. You had much more confidence in my ability to do that than I did. Finally, I promised that even if I failed or, God forbid, you fell in love with someone else . . . I’d be there to protect you. Because that one I knew I could keep.”

I stare at my sandwich.

The weird desperation that day in the Food Mart. The manic way he chased me up Lily Bay Road. Coming after me to Indiana . . .

When I look up, his expression is pained.

“I didn’t come here to feel helpless. And that’s how I felt this morning. When I realized you were gone and then saw the murders on the news, I was convinced you had died in a hundred horrible ways. I know now exactly why you weren’t willing to just take the years we had left. The constant worry and fear . . . I get it, and I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” I say awkwardly. “It’s not like I remember.”

He reaches over and takes my hand between his. “You loved me once. You don’t have to believe me. You don’t even have to like me, though of course I wish you did. But I’ll take knowing you’re alive over knowing you’re mine any day.” He looks up at me. “All that is to say, if nothing else, please don’t do that to me again.”

I say nothing. If he’s playing me, I already feel like an idiot—to myself, most of all. If he’s not . . . that’s actually harder to consider.