Page 28 of Into Ember

“You really didn’t know,” she says. “That they were mine. The dreams.”

“I didn’t know there was a yours for them to be.” And there it is — the thing I’ve been circling all morning without seeing, arriving the way the true things do, all at once and from behind. “You thought those dreams belonged only to you.”

“Yes, Rayner. That’s what dreams ARE.”

“Not for me.” But I’m hearing it now. She had one place. One place in her whole lonely, complicated life that she believed was entirely hers, one room no neighbor could hear through the wall or an ex that could break through, and I was in it, being happy, for years. I make myself hold that all the way, and it costs, and I don’t look away from it, because she’s had to hold it since she woke up. “I’m not sorry I was there,” I say, and Brock’s head turns, and I keep going anyway, because she’d know if I lied and I’d rather be wrong than false. “I can’t be. You were the best part of my nights for years and I didn’t even believe in you. But I am sorry that you found out you were never alone in the one place you were sure you were. That’s a real thing I took, and I didn’t know I was taking it, and knowing it now doesn’t give it back.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while.

Then she picks up her coffee, both hands around the body of it again and I have to hold back a smile. She takes a sip, and says, to the mug more than to me, “The stars were nice, though.”

I let go of the edge of the table. I hadn’t noticed I was holding it.

“They’re real,” I say. “The stars. From the ridge, in deep winter. I’ll show you.”

“I haven’t forgiven you.”

“I know.”

“Any of you. There’s a list. There’s an entire — Gunnar, why are you looking at me like that.”

“No reason,” Gunnar says, with every reason, and Leif pushes off the counter, and I feel the weather in the room shift as the bigger conversation loads.

Under the table, where nobody can see it, her foot is tucked up beneath her on the chair, the same way it always was in her dreams.

But now she’s here, real and right in front of me. Living a life where she drinks coffee at my table and argues with me in daylight and remembers, she remembers, she remembered the whole time.

Chapter 10

Brock

Leif gets one word out.

“Elara—”

“Nest.”

She doesn’t even look at him. The commander of Ásp Móra gets overruled with one syllable, folds his arms, and settles back against the counter to wait his turn — and I would genuinely enjoy that if her eyes weren’t already on me.

I hold the look. Holding looks is nothing. I’ve been read by the best liars on two continents and given them a pleasant morning and nothing else.

Her eyes narrow.

She caught it. Somewhere in the last half-second, something I hadn’t chosen to show crossed my face, and she caught it, and I watch her catch it, and she watches me watch her catch it. Somewhere in that hall of mirrors I realize something I’m not ready to realize.

She’s reading me.

Correctly.

I have sat on the outside of this exact moment for four centuries, warm coffee in hand, enjoying other people’s faces coming apart. I understand now that I owe several of those people apologies.

“So,” she says. Pleasant. Terribly pleasant. “The nest.”

“That’s Erik’s.” Which is true. She built it for him. He slept in it that night. He would defend it with his life. “It was his bed. Anything about that bed is his to—”

“No.”

“Leif is commander. Anything that happened that night falls under—”