I tell Oliver everything. Every detail of my day, every secret I hear in the Haxahaven faculty lounge, every scrap of gossip from Anais’s letters.

I tell him everything except one thing.

What is a secret, if not an act of love?

There’s nothing he can do to fix it.

“Does he know?” Finn asks one night. That’s who he is between us. Finn never speaks Oliver’s name out loud.

“No.” I won’t give Finn the satisfaction of his jealousy. I won’t give Oliver the pain of Finn’s continued existence, even in this terrible half state. He isn’t a person anymore, he’s a cold spot in an empty room, a horrible promise to love me forever fulfilled. He’s a hand on the back of my neck and it’s squeezing and I don’t know when the last time I took a full breath was.

“Is it because you’d know he’d be jealous?”

“You think Oliver is the kind of man who’d be jealous of you? You’re barely even real.”

“You’re afraid of how he’d react,” Finn volleys.

I shake my head. “I’m not.”

“He’s weak.”

I resist the urge to hit him. “You’re dead.”

Finn smiles, sure and smug, but I know he must be lonely trapped here all alone. “He’ll never make you happy.”

I gesture to myself. “And yet look at me. Happy. Engaged, too.” It’s petty and venomous to tell him, but the fire in my chest flares as I say it. In my dream, the emerald band is not on my finger. I am forever dressed as Finn last saw me in the catacombs, in Maxine’s borrowed baby-blue silk gown.

I get the reaction I want from him immediately. Finn furrows his brow, something terrible flickering in his eyes.

“That’s not a funny joke.”

I smile at his anger. “I’ve never been good at telling jokes, you know that.”

He shoves his hands in his pockets and tilts his chin up, defiant. It only has the effect of making him look younger. “You’re already married to me.”

I laugh. “That wasn’t a marriage, that was a trick.”

“We said vows.”

“I hate you.”

He takes a step toward me. “I love you.”

I look him square in the eye. “One day, I will die happy and loved, at the end of a full life, and be at peace forever, and you’ll be left alone to go mad in an empty dream.”

I expect him to respond, but instead, Finn just looks.

And I look back. At his freckles and curls and sharp eyes and arms that tossed my brother’s body in a river.