“I mean a long-distance relationship.” Madeleine leaned forward until her sweater almost touched the roasted potatoes on her plate. Her eyes were alight now, her earlier reticence gone. “I mean you and I stay together even though we can’t be together physically all the time. I feel silly for not thinking of it before, like it’s got to be all-or-nothing.”

Hæra’s head spun. “How could we be together without…being together?”

“We’d call each other. Every day if we can.” Madeleine tapped her fingertips against the table’s edge in an anxious, arrhythmic beat. “I’d want to talk to you every day. Hear your voice.”

Talking—yes—but what about embracing? What about kissing, holding hands, and having sex? They couldn’t do that if Madeleine lived in America.

Madeleine seemed to read her mind. “We’d see each other as often as we could. I’m good at saving money and finding deals. I’d come here every summer and on longer holidays, and you could visit me too.”

Visit? Hæra had never considered that she could leave the farm for a little while and then just…come back. As an Each-uisge, she’d been bound to the sea by nature and to Orkney by habit.

Madeleine’s eyes sparkled like morning dew on pastures. “Lancaster isn’t exciting, but I don’t live too far from Philadelphia. We could even go to New York, or take a trip somewhere else—somewhere with mountains, maybe. You’ve never seen mountains, right? There’s so much I want to show you. And you’ll love Becca.”

Love wouldn’t come so easily to Hæra as it did to Madeleine, even as a human. She was prepared to like Becca, however. This solution might not be the worst? At least it was better than Madeleine leaving for good.

She gnawed her bottom lip. “And—we’d do this for the rest of our lives?”

The words’ significance didn’t hit her until they were out of her mouth. She’d spoken often of wanting to be with Madeleine. She’d never said, specifically, that she wanted it to be for a lifetime. Madeleine might think it was “too soon” for that as well.

Hæra would never be human enough not to want her forever.

“No, I wasn’t thinking that,” Madeleine said.

The cold lump returned to Hæra’s throat tenfold. She clenched her hands in her lap so they couldn’t do something wrong, like reach over the table and haul Madeleine into her arms, plates and glasses be damned. Her old instincts whispered, Make her stay. Make her your own.

That wouldn’t do anymore. Madeleine must choose, and it seemed she had. Hæra bowed her head.

“No, no.” Madeleine sounded alarmed. “I mean eventually we’d be together all the time!”