The dream is hazy at first, like the sky on the first day of September. The landscape comes into focus slowly. A sprawling green field, greener than anything I’ve ever seen in New York. The grass is soft, waving in the light breeze. A ways off, sheep graze high on a hill, calm and quiet.

First, there is just the low whistle of the wind. Then, there is a voice.

“Hi, love.”

I clutch my chest over my dress, gasping as I turn around.

I’d know his voice anywhere, even in death. Standing in the field, wearing a hand-knit cream-colored sweater, his curls blowing in the breeze, is Finn.

“No.” I turn away from him and clench my eyes shut, willing myself to wake from this dream. It’s too cruel, this imaginary version of him the deepest recesses of my brain have dredged up.

“No,” I say again. This time it sounds more like a sob than a word.

“Are you that unhappy to see me?” he asks.

“You aren’t real,” I say. You’re dead. It’s my fault.

The dream-Finn extends a hand out to touch me on the shoulder, but I recoil before he makes contact. I shut my eyes as tight as I can. Wakeupwakeupwakeup.

I come to, drenched in sweat, alone in my room. Mabel must still be up patrolling. At least I don’t have to explain why I’m crying.

After that, I fight sleep, like it’s a battle I can win. I stay up reading novels and texts on forgery magic until my eyes grow so heavy, I wake with the book still open on my chest and the kerosene lamp on the bedside flickering as it burns through the last drops of oil.

Weeks pass and the dream doesn’t come back. It waits just long enough that I am lulled into submission.

But then, in the dark, in the same green field, he is waiting.

He looks so calm, the personification of all my stinging, awful, ugly hurt.

“I missed you,” he greets me.

I can’t help it, I march up to him and I hit his chest, solid and real under my fists. I punch and punch and punch against his breastbone until I am sobbing, and he catches me just before my knees hit the wet earth.

“You’re dead,” I cry.

He pulls back and looks at me with those sharp hazel eyes. “I am.”

“Then how are you here?”

He shrugs casually but there is fear in his eyes. “I don’t know.”

He once told me I’d been haunting him his whole life. Am I to suffer the same fate? Are we truly that tied together?

I refuse to accept it. “No.”

“It doesn’t seem either of us have a choice, love.”