I came back into my body gasping.
The candles had burned down considerably. Three hours had passed in the In Between while I stood there staring at a silhouette that could not be what I thought it was, because what I thought it was would restructure everything I had spent four days carefully rebuilding on the ruins of grief.
I sat on my bedroom floor for a long time.
I did not go to Caelan.
I went to Oryn.
He answered his door at three in the morning with the alert eyes of someone who had been trained for too long to sleep deeply and the expression of a man recalibrating to the specific kind of controlled distress on my face.
“Tell me,” he said, stepping back to let me in.
I told him.
All of it. The voice in the In Between since the beginning. The center that had been waiting seven
