Fin pushes his nose against my palm, warm and wet, a lick to the ear. I try to speak, to open my eyes, but they are too heavy. I squint and at the end of the couch, Oliver is shoving more logs into the woodstove, filling it quickly. He cusses, slams his hand in the door maybe, then stands up and crosses the room again. Waves of heat surge into the cabin. But I don’t sweat—I shiver.

“Nora!” he says again, I’m certain of it this time. “Stay awake,” he tells me. I nod, or I think I do. My mouth opens to tell him I’m fine, but I feel my jaw hang there, no words escaping past my lips. My mouth too numb, my tongue worthless.

He drapes blankets over me—heavy, heavy blankets made of wool—so heavy they push me into sleep. They push me down into the fibers of the old dusty couch, between the cushions. Where lost paper clips and rose petals and M&M’s hide.

But I’m convulsing now, the cold shot through my lungs, severing my skin down to bone, and everything starts to blur over. Water pressing against my eyes, sinking, everything turning not black but white. Bone white. Moon white. Ash white.

“Why did you go out there?” Oliver’s voice says from somewhere far away, from up in the rafters of the house. I feel his hands against my feet, rubbing them, sending spikes of pain up my calves. It hurts! I want to tell him, to scream. But my mouth still won’t move, or he just doesn’t listen. My blood is too hot, scalding, as it surges back through cold veins.

I kick my legs but they don’t move. I close my eyes and chase the moth down through the trees, I run after it, and when I catch it I will pluck its wings clean from its body. But it spins high up toward a strange purple sky where three moons sit on the horizon, and it laughs at me. Foolish girl, it hisses. Hiss hiss hiss.

I flash my eyes open and look up at the ceiling, at cobwebs draped woefully from the beams down toward the corner of a window. “I saw the hole,” I say, but it sounds like nonsense. “I saw where he drowned,” I try, but my lips are too frozen, and Oliver presses his hand to my forehead. He rubs a warm cloth across my skin.

“Nora,” he says again. Always my name, like there is nothing else to say. He wants me to wake, to open my eyes, to prove I’m not a witch. I shake my head. I’m hearing things that aren’t real. Imagining words that never leave his lips.

I try to bend my fingers into fists, but they won’t move. So I give up.