My knees start to buckle and I want to cry, but the air is too cold and the tears evaporate against my eyelids. I want to yell into the trees. I want to blame someone—anyone—other than Oliver. But my head clatters and my grandmother’s words keep repeating: The lake remembers. But I don’t want to know the truth. I want to go back to the loft, to earlier tonight with his lips on mine and his hands in my hair and my palms against his rising chest. I want to forget. I want to undo everything that’s been done. I want to go back to the night of the storm and tell Oliver to not go to the cemetery. To not go out onto the lake. To avoid this place and those boys. Because once death has wrapped its cool hooked claws around you, it cannot be undone. And only regret remains.

Sorrow and guilt and regret.

And now the lies cannot be put back together. Not when you hold the truth in your hand.

I slide the chain into my pocket, my breath flat and fettered. All this time. Maybe this is why he went into the Wicker Woods—to hide, to wait until the road thawed so he could flee. Escape the punishment he would face.

But he got lost, went too deep into the forest—a forest that is ancient and cruel and doesn’t so easily let people back out. I found him and brought him back, and now he is asleep in my room, in my house. And I am split in two.

I shuffle away from the icy hole, my whole body trembling, my mind wheeling forward and back, remembering my lips sinking against Oliver’s. Remembering his hands in my hair, the same hands that surely struggled with Max, that forced him into the icy water, that broke the chain of the watch. The same hands that refused to pull Max back up—to save his life. The hands that touched my skin, my collarbone, so close to my throat.

I blink down at the hole one last time, branding it to memory, when I hear the sound of hairline cracks spreading out beneath my feet.

I’ve stood here too long, the hole widening in front of me, pieces of ice bobbing at the surface, some sinking into the dark, dark water below. Shit. I waited too long.

Cold mountain air blows through my hair, and I take several slow, careful steps back—the ice a sheet of glass beneath my feet. Bending, breaking, giving way.

In the distance, I hear my name, carried up and away by the wind—almost not there at all. My head turns slowly, afraid to move, afraid to blink, and I see Oliver standing on the shore, snow whirling around him. He calls my name again, his voice swallowed by the cold.