His skin is not pale or sallow, his eyes do not look tormented by his memory of the forest. He looks strong. Different. Not how I remember.

But his face twists when I say his name, arms stiffening at his sides. He doesn’t remember me. He doesn’t know who I am. And the realization breaks me apart. Makes me want to scream. To cry out. To grab him and dig my fingernails into his flesh.

I breathe and each inhale is a rattle.

The other boys are almost to the lakeshore—they haven’t yet seen me. And Rhett is shoving Lin playfully, laughing, their voices muffled by the falling snow.

“We can’t stay here,” I say to Oliver, snapping my eyes back to his. But still, he sways away from me. Just out of reach.

My head begins to clack and drum. My jaw chattering. I know I need to get warm, I need to get inside. My body is too cold. But Oliver only looks at me with the distant look of a stranger. Who won’t reach out and touch me. Who doesn’t remember anything from before, who looks into my eyes and sees only a girl. Nothing more.

But the silence is broken by another voice.

By Rhett, shouting through the snow. “Who the fuck are you?” he calls. My eyes lift only briefly, to see that Rhett has moved back to the cemetery fence—probably having realized that Oliver didn’t follow them out.

I open my mouth, and my lips begin to quiver. Oliver doesn’t know who I am. None of them do. “I’m—” I start, but my voice catches at the back of my teeth. I’m a witch. A witch who might have moonlight in her veins after all. Who jumped into the lake and woke on a night that’s already happened. A witch who has felt time slipping around her, who believed she didn’t have a nightshade. But maybe, maybe, I was wrong. Maybe I can’t bring back the dead—maybe no witch can. But I can do something else.

The wind grows stronger, and it blows my hair away from my neck. Up toward the sky. Wild and woven into knots.

Maybe I wanted it bad enough. My heart cracked so deeply it split open and my shadow side spilled out like black mud. When you need it, your nightshade will come. Maybe it’s been there all along. The part of me that felt time tumbling just out of reach. The moments when I was certain I had been there before, the déjà vu. Over and over and over. A thing I couldn’t hold on to long enough, a thing I didn’t understand. A thing I couldn’t control.

Until now. Now.