He reaches me and time slows. He lifts his head and my heart climbs back up into my chest, braiding itself together—thin fibers of thread to make it whole.

His eyes rove the ground at first, then click to mine. We stare at each other, and I see him searching my face for memories. For moments in time he won’t find. Because when I peer into his eyes, I know he doesn’t remember me. The girl who pulled him from the Wicker Woods and let him sleep beside her. He lifts his hand and I hold in a breath; I watch him without blinking. I think he’s going to touch my neck, my face, my collarbone, but his fingers graze my hair, so gently I hardly feel it. My eyes flutter closed, and his hand draws back again.

When I open my eyes, I see he’s holding something between his fingers—a small twig, a green spiny leaf clinging to one end, as if it were awaiting spring.

“The forest sticks to you,” he says. Without knowing it, he repeats what I told him the first time he pulled a bit of the forest from my hair. The morning after I found him and we walked back to the boys’ camp.

A sob catches in my throat and a smile splits across my face.

He holds the leaf in his hand, a remnant from when I woke in the trees, my hair lying across the ground, and maybe, maybe he remembers some small part of me. Something that nags at him.

His eyes narrow, and for a moment he looks pained, like he’s trying to pick apart the bits of shadows from forgotten memory. The things that haven’t happened yet.

“Maybe we met once before?” he asks, his eyebrows sloped down, his hair curling just behind his ears as the snow falls around us.

My fingers want to touch him again, but I only let myself nod, afraid he’ll slip away. “I think we did.”

“I think I liked you then,” he says.

Tears begin spilling down my cheeks, unstoppable, heavy tears. Salt and sweet. “I think I liked you too.”

He holds out his arm, and with the tips of his fingers, he wipes away the tears from my chin. He smiles just a little, and I feel like my legs might give out.

I can’t stop myself, I shift forward and press both my hands to his chest. He doesn’t jerk away. I feel the steady thump, thump, thump pulsing from inside him. A boy who is alive. I could never find his heartbeat before—his lungs breathed, his eyes blinked closed, his skin went warm and then cold. Yet, his heart had been missing. As if it were unable to recall the cadence it once strummed. But now I can feel it beneath my flattened palms, and my whole body begins to shake.