Chapter 71:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

She held the clay face in one hand and Rune’s hand in the other. The monitor beeped. The ambulance moved. The siren did the screaming for her.

***

POV TESS

He’s here.

At the boundary. The glass. The membrane. Whatever this place is — the place where I’ve been standing for seven years, watching, wanting, pressing against a wall that doesn’t break.

His body is in the ambulance. His body is being worked on by Bryn and Cade and the paramedics. But the part of him that is not body — the part that floats free when the heart stops and the brain goes dark — is here. At the glass. Next to me.

For the first time in seven years, we are on the same side.

“Rune,” I say.

He doesn’t hear. Or — he hears something. A vibration. Not my voice. The dead don’t have voices. But something reaches him, because the part of him that is here turns toward me, and for one moment we see each other.

My brother. His face.

He looks like he did when we were young — before the business, before the diagnosis, before me. He looks like a boy who used to laugh without it sounding broken.

I could keep him. I feel this — a pull, a possibility. I could hold on. I could draw him through the glass into this half-place where I’ve been hovering for seven years, and we could exist together in the cold and the watching, and I would not be alone anymore.

But Bryn is in the ambulance. I can see her through the glass — holding the clay face, holding his hand. Her face is the face of a woman doing everything in her power to keep a man on the living side of a line he’s crossed.

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗴𝗮𝗹𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘀.𝗰𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘀

He needs to go back. She needs him to go back. And I — I need them to have what I can’t.

“Go back to her,” I say.

The words are not words. They’re a push. A frequency. The dead girl’s version of CPR — one beat, delivered from the other side, aimed at the thread that connects my brother to the woman who gave me back my face.

“Go back, Rune.”

He turns. Away from me. Toward the living. Toward the ambulance and the monitors and Bryn.

The glass thickens. The boundary closes. He’s gone. Back to the other side.

And I am here. Alone. Having made a choice that the dead don’t get to make. I had him. For one moment, on my side of the glass, I had my brother. And I sent him back.

The sending is the hardest thing I’ve done since dying. And the best.

Go live, Rune. Go live for both of us.

***

POV BRYN

Surgery. Three hours. The cardiac team, the surgeon, Cade signing the consent form because Bryn couldn’t hold a pen.

Lucienne arrived without being called. Coffee. Presence. The grace of a woman who understood death in every register and who showed up because showing up was what you did.

“He’s strong,” Lucienne said.

“His heart is failing.”

“His heart has been failing for over a year and he’s still here. That’s not the heart. That’s the man.”

The surgeon came out. Scrubs. Mask down.

“He survived. We’ve implanted a defibrillator and done a septal myectomy to reduce the obstruction. The heart is compromised. He’ll need a transplant eventually. But he’s alive.”

“Can I see him?”

“One hour.”

She saw him in one hour. Same monitors. Same green line tracing the geography of his heart. But the geography was different now — smoother, the skip still present but mediated by the device under his skin. Steadier.

He woke on the third day.

She was in the chair. She’d been there for three days — sleeping in ten-minute increments, eating what Cade brought, washing her face in the bathroom. Tess’s clay face was on the nightstand beside the water pitcher.

His eyes opened. Focused. Found her.

“Bryn.”

“I’m here.”

“How long?”

“Three days.”

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