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The bottle slipped from his hand sometime after midnight, landing on its side on the carpet. What remained spilled slowly toward the bed.

Samuel didn’t notice.

He fell across the mattress without removing his clothes, one arm stretched toward the empty space beside him.

My side.

I lay down there because I didn’t know where else I belonged.

I don’t know how long I watched him sleep before I felt it. A shift in the air between us, subtle as a held breath finally released. His face eased, some of the tension that had lived in his jaw for days finally loosening. His lips parted around a sound too soft to be a word.

Raven.

I felt my name before I heard it, the same way I used to feel his hands on me. Before I realized what was happening, the motel room dissolved around us.

We were at the cottage, whole and unbroken, sunlight pouring gold through the window the way it used to on mornings we had nowhere to be. I was standing at the foot of our bed. Samuel was there too. He was younger somehow, or maybe just unburdened. None of the last few months were carved into his face yet.

“You’re here,” he said, like he couldn’t quite believe it, as he crossed the room to reach me.

“Of course I’m here.” My own voice sounded different, steadier, like whatever thin nothing I’d become had been given breath. And the impossible gift of a body that could still be touched.

His hands found my face, and this time I felt him. Warm. Real. Solid in a way nothing has been since the creek. I leaned into his palm and felt tears I didn’t know I could still cry.

“I’ve missed you,” he said, his forehead dropping to mine. “God, Raven, I’ve missed you so much it’s killing me.”

“I know.” My hands found the front of his shirt, fisting the fabric like I could keep him there through touch alone. “I know, and I’m right here.”

He kissed me like a starving man. Like every day since Christmas Eve had been building toward this moment. I kissed him back the same way, desperate and certain and finally allowed to feel something besides absence.

I don’t know if this was his dream or mine, or whether that even mattered. I only know that for the first time since I died, I existed in a body that responded to his, that arched into his hands when they slid beneath my shirt, that gasped when his mouth found the curve of my throat in the spot it always used to.

“Stay,” he whispered against my skin, laying my back against sheets that smelled like us, like home. “Please. Just stay like this.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

It was a lie, and some small part of me already knew it. But here, in whatever borrowed time and space his grief had built for us, I let myself believe anyway.

His weight settled over me, familiar in every way that mattered. I wrapped myself around him like I could weld the two of us back together through sheer will. Every place he touched me came alive beneath his hands. Every place his mouth found me answered as if it’d never stopped being able to.

We moved together in the way we always had, like our bodies remembered each other even if the world had decided we weren’t allowed to anymore.

For a while, there was no grief. No creek. No motel room. No bottle spilling onto a stained carpet. There was only Samuel, whole and warm and mine, and the quiet aching relief of being held in his arms again.

“I love you,” he said against my hair in the aftermath, our legs still tangled together. “I love you, Raven. Forever, remember? I meant it.”

“I remember.” I pressed my palm flat over his heart, feeling it beat beneath my hand, real and steady, and his. “I love you, too. Forever doesn’t stop just because I did.”

He smiled at that, soft, sad, and achingly familiar. I held onto the shape of it as hard as I could, but it all started to fade before I was ready for it to.

I felt myself being pulled backward. The cottage dissolved at the edges like watercolor left out in the rain. Samuel's hands slipped from where they’d been resting against my skin. I reached for him anyway, the way I always did. This time, just for a moment, I could’ve sworn his fingers tightened around mine before the whole world came apart.

I woke, if that’s even the word for what I do, back in the motel room. The lamp was still burning yellow and dim, the bottle now empty on the floor.

I’d believed the worst thing that could happen was leaving him. I’d imagined his grief in the dark hours when sleep wouldn’t come, had pictured him at the cabin alone and wondered how he’d survive a life we both knew I wouldn’t finish beside him.

I thought staying would be enough.

I thought the thread meant I could still protect him somehow, that refusing The Light had bought me the time I needed to make sure he kept living after I couldn’t.