“They wanted Max dead?”

Oliver is quiet—midnight quiet, tiptoe quiet—and I ask, “Do you remember what happened now?” Is this why he’s standing out here on the roof, watching for the boys? Because his memories have returned? Because he recalls each moment out on that lake, with Max and the others?

He uncrosses his arms, slow and deliberate. “It’s too late now anyway. We can’t undo what’s been done.” His chest rises with each breath, his flat green eyes so wretchedly deep and dark that I feel drawn to him again. And even though there is disquiet in him—doubt and fear and fury, for the things he won’t say—I could also reach up on my tiptoes and press my lips against his. I could blot out his thoughts, the worry set deep in his eyes. I could blot out everything, take it from him and swallow it down and make it untrue. I am a Walker, and I should be able to do this one thing. A simple, singular thing: take a memory, take a death—and make it right.

But I can’t undo it. And I don’t lean forward and kiss him under the weight of the sallow moon. I stare at him and wait for him to speak. And when he does, it’s like vinegar and salt, a wound that will never heal. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, his eyes sloped down at the edges.

“You won’t,” I say. As if I can be sure.

He looks back into the trees, and dread burrows into the marrow of my bones, writhing inside me like shipworms making tunnels in my flesh.

He shakes his head—he doesn’t believe me. “I don’t want you to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” I tell him. But I know that I am, a wretched knot of fear growing in my gut. I’m scared to trust him, to let this flutter inside my chest become a hammer that will smash me apart. We love painfully, Mom always says. With our whole hearts. But we bruise easily too. She has always been afraid of her own careless heart, of past mistakes, of what she really is. And I don’t want to be like her: cynical and fearful and full of more doubt than anything else.

Oliver steps closer to me, and I think he’s going to kiss me, but his hand touches mine instead. “You’re shaking,” he says.

My body trembles, the cold sapping what little warmth is left inside me. But I say, “I’m fine.”