An exhale leaves his lips, and he steps closer to me, only a few inches away, and he takes my hand in his. He doesn’t remember any of it—not really—but he knows that I do.

And maybe that’s enough.

“You’re shaking,” he says, cupping my hands in his and drawing them up to his lips where he blows warm air against my fingers. “Can we go somewhere?” he asks.

I nod but my legs don’t move, my heart clattering too fast, the trees swaying and snapping back.

“This storm is getting bad.” He looks up to the sky, and snow lands in his hair, the tips of his ears, his cheekbones.

I smile and more tears come. I smile and know that maybe, perhaps, everything’s going to be okay. “I’ve seen worse,” I say, smirking.

The black at the rims of his eyes recedes—the darkness I remember from before, that was always inside him. The cold has slipped away—as if it were never there at all.

And with his hand in mine, we walk around the shore of the lake, past the boathouse, where inside Mr. Perkins’s cabin I can see him at the window, watching the snow come down. He waves again and gives a little nod, and I wave back.

Time has been undone. Sent back in reverse.

A storm is coming, the worst we’ve had all year. The road will be blocked and the power will flicker out and we’ll be trapped for weeks.

But we’ll have time. Plenty of it.

I always will.

OLIVER

Her name is Nora Walker.

I don’t know anything about her, yet somehow I remember the arch of her smile. The soft river of her hair. The flutter of her eyes when she watches me. The scent of her skin like jasmine and vanilla. And when her lips purse together and she hums a song under her breath, memories I can’t possibly have pour through me.

She is a name and a heartbeat that lives inside me. In a way I don’t understand.

The snow falls and the power blinks out and the road down the mountains is blocked. But she doesn’t seem surprised—not by the storm, not by any of it.

The lake freezes and Nora takes me up onto the roof. She tells me stories—fables that couldn’t possibly be real. About a boy who drowned, who appeared again inside a dark wood, how he couldn’t escape the memory of the trees. The cold. And sometimes I think she’s talking about me. She tells me how the boy saves a girl from inside a room, how he believes she’s a witch but he’s not afraid. How neither of them fear the other even though they should.