He squeezes my hand and pulls me to him, my head against his chest, his breath in my hair. He holds me to him and I want to cry—as if this will be the last time. “We need to get you inside,” he says. But I don’t want to, I want to stay out here with him and let the cold turn me to stone.

Still he pulls me back to the window, my muscles too weak to resist, and he lifts me up, placing me back through the open window into the loft.

My legs shake, and I crawl into bed, pulling the blankets up to my chin, while he shuts the window with a thud and locks it in place. As if to keep out the things we fear the most.

“Will you stay here with me?” I ask when he starts to move toward the stairs—my voice shaking. “Please.”

I don’t want to be alone, in this awful dark. With my skin like ice. I touch the place on my finger where my grandmother’s ring used to sit, feeling stripped bare without it. My accidental offering to the lake—just like the miners who used to drop things into the water to calm the trees.

Oliver looks back, his eyes coursing with something I don’t understand. A battle inside him. He wants to stay here with me, but he’s also afraid of what he might do. Or what he might say. He’s constructed an armor around himself, stone and metal and painful memories. Before, there was only confusion in his eyes—the void of what he had forgotten. Now, there is a wall of shadows. Tall and wide.

Still, he nods and crosses the room to lie beside me.

Maybe he doesn’t want to be alone either.

He smells like snow, and I fold myself into him—tiny like a shell. His arm drapes over my ribs, and his breath is at my neck. He could place his lips at the soft place behind my ear, he could run his fingers through my hair, but instead he only lies still. Warming my skin with his. Please, I want to say. Tell me what you did that night. Tell me what you saw out on that ice; tell me what you regret.

Tell me so I can build my own armor. A fortress in this tiny loft, a battlefield you cannot cross.

But I also know it’s too late for that now.

I turn, coiled in his arms, to face him. I take his hand and place it against my chest, over my heart. “I don’t know if I can trust this,” I say, I confess. “This thing inside my own heart.” I let myself bleed for him to see.

His mouth softens but he doesn’t speak, his eyes shivering.