Page 223 of Ex Somnis

I look at the moonstone on her throat again. I started to think of it as mine, but it never was. It was only ever on loan from a woman who needed it back to make the crossing she’d been dreaming of her whole sick, lonely, loving life.

I’m going to miss it like a limb.

Mabel follows my eyes to the stone, and she sighs.

“Sera and I were friends for sixty years,” she muses. “I knew all of it. I watched her fall into this hole inch by inch and couldn’t pull her out.” Her eyes find Nevan’s. “When the sickness started, and she started forgetting and slipping, I took the crystal off her and hid it in Jasper’s collection, because I thought without it, without her anchor, maybe she couldn’t go so deep. Maybe she’d come back to us. Maybe I could give those boys their mother back.” She presses her hand to her mouth. “But she was already gone by then. The sickness had her. I didn’t save anyone. I took her favorite thing away in her last clear years for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” I say, because I can’t not. “It came to me to help Tessa and give Seraphine what she wanted in the end. So it did exactly what she wanted. It took the long way around.”

“Still, I’m so sorry I couldn’t give you your mother back, Nevan.”

Nevan reaches out to put a hand on Mabel’s arm. “I never had her in the first place, but I had you.”

“And we have you now,” Paul tells him.

Nevan doesn’t answer. He nods once, but a small smile tugs at his lips, making my heart feel a little lighter.

Morning light spills across the floorboards, touching Seraphine’s still hands, the moonstone at her throat, the scattered crystals around her like tiny fallen stars.

There is nothing left to fight.

My phone rings with that obnoxious ringtone Jasper gave me. It’s loud in the quiet room, and I almost don’t answer it. I almost let it go, because how could anything else happen today? How is there room for one more thing? However, the screen reads Derek, and with a jolt, I remember what actually just happened. My heart is in my throat before my thumb even moves.

“Derek! Shit, Derek, how is she? Did she wake up? Is she…”

There’s a fumbling sound, then a few slow breaths, and then a voice I haven’t heard in twelve years.

Not in waking life.

Not with my actual ears.

A voice I have only heard inside dreams, and it’s so rough, cracked, and small from twelve years of silence that it barely makes it down the line at all.

But it’s hers.

“Lenny.”

“Tessa.” I’m already moving toward the door.

“Come to me.”

EPILOGUE PART ONE

FIVE WEEKS LATER

Lennon

It’s the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, which Jasper informs me roughly every twenty minutes is extremely auspicious for a birthday. I have been cooking since before the sun came up, though on the solstice it isn’t actually that impressive of a flex.

The restaurant smells like everything I love.

That’s not a figure of speech. I built the menu out of it on purpose. Lemon, brown butter, rosemary, and the dark, sweet smell of the cake cooling on the rack, the one with the candied citrus on top that took me three tries because the first two weren’t good enough for them.

Tessa’s cake.

Jasper’s cake.

They share a birthday, which I think Jasper finds spiritually significant and Tessa finds mildly annoying. It’s exactly the right ratio of the two of them.