You scared me,” Nora says, striding into the house, then turning on her heels to face me. Her hair is coming away from its braid, black strands trailing over her neck, and her skin is flushed from the cold—strawberry cheeks and bone-white eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

She raises her eyebrows at me, like she needs more of an explanation, like the softness she felt for me the night she first found me is now gone. Replaced by something else: doubt. And maybe even fear.

Perhaps I am becoming the villain after all.

“What were you doing out there?” she asks.

My hands shiver, and I curl them into fists so she won’t see. “I saw Rhett and the others sneak away from camp,” I tell her. The truth. Only the truth. “I followed them.”

“Why?” she asks, the space between her eyes punctuated by tiny lines.

“I don’t trust them.” I repeat what I told her last night. A puddle of melted snow collects at my feet, but I don’t remove my boots. I don’t know if she’ll let me stay. If she wants me here at all. If she trusts me. “I saw the bonfire, and you, and I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I admit.

Her eyes narrow, and she looks stricken by something, a pain I can’t quite see. “You don’t need to follow me,” she says. “Or protect me.”

“I know.” And I do know. She’s not weak, she’s not frail or breakable or scared of much. She is the storm that tears away roofs and knocks over trees. Yet, I needed to be sure she was safe. I needed to be nearer to her. She is the only thing that dampens the feeling of the cold, the memory of the forest always at the nape of my neck. She mutes the darkness always looking for a way in.

Nora blows out a breath and crosses her arms. “Where did you go this morning?” she asks, eyebrows slanted down at the edges.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Her mouth comes together in the shape of a bow, like she doesn’t believe me. “I followed your footprints around the lake,” she confesses. The wolf lifts its head from the floor and sniffs the air, like he smells something unfamiliar, before resting his chin back on his paws. “Why did you go to the cemetery?”

I divert my eyes away from her for the first time, away from what she wants to know. I don’t know how to explain what I remember, what I felt. They are only shards of memory that slice and sting when I try to focus on them. “I think I was there that night,” I say—the only thing I can be sure of.

“And you stood over Willa Walker’s grave?”

A white-hot pain begins to pulse behind my eyes. “Yeah.”

“Why hers?”