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Four months, three weeks and six days passed before the grey cloud over my life lifted. Winter hit, and I hadn’t even noticed the seasons changing until spring was just a few days away. I could count and write my own name now—pretty much do most things my friends could—but I’d done it without a wink of sleep since I last had that dream. Every time I closed my eyes now, I dreamed about a past I was beginning to miss—endlessly searching for that child but so afraid at the same time, because if I found it, and I learned that it had died, I wasn’t sure I could face the world after that. If losing a friend had devastated me so much, what would it do to me to lose a child? I only had to think of the pain of missing Harry to get a glimpse, and Harry wasn’t even my kid. But when his birthday came around, I sobbed for the entire day and even made cupcakes to sing him Happy Birthday, wherever he was. I hoped that even if my song wouldn’t reach him, the love from inside it would.

On my left hand, the ring I’d moved from my right hand since that dream burned. I studied it often, wondering why it was melted, if it had anything to do with my death, and I wondered more often than that where my husband was. Something told me that the reason my past was kept secret—the reason my ring was melted—was because he’d died when I lost my memory. I felt like that was the big thing they all kept from me. And if it was, I was glad, because I could still feel the love I had for him, and if someone told me he was dead, it would kill me. I knew I’d never love anyone like that ever again, but at the same time, if he was still alive, I wondered why he hadn’t come for me. And then I wondered if I would want him to—if maybe this great love was something best left in my dreams—as if maybe the truth, the love itself, might not be so magical in real life.

Downstairs, I could hear Brett talking to someone on the phone. It sounded like another argument, and I heard my name and David’s a few times. I hadn’t told him much, other than the fact that David left, but from the tone of the argument, I got the sense that he was learning more right now. Probably from Mike.

In the end, he hung up the phone and the night went quiet. He didn’t come upstairs to talk about it. He was probably as disappointed in me as I was in myself.

I sat in my window frame and hugged my knees, taking in the stars between the gaps in the clouds. I wondered if David was looking at the same stars, and I found it odd that I used to wonder that about Cal. But everything I thought I had with Cal was gone now. As soon as I realized David left, I decided love and relationships were for people that had lived longer than eight months. I’d only ever seen someone cry the way David did on TV, and it had reduced me to a sobbing mess, so to see it in real life left me kind of scarred. I needed to make David better and, at this point, I had to admit to myself that I wouldn’t move on until I did.

A loud rap on the front door so late at night brought my curiosity to life, shutting out all my thoughts. I heard Brett talking to someone before his feet thudded up the stairs and he knocked on my door.

“Ara?” he called. “You awake?”

I quickly tidied my hair and wiped the tears from my cheeks, calling him and the obvious guest with him to enter.

“Hey,” he said, leaning in, keeping the door half closed to block whoever was behind him. But I smelled him before Brett could say another word, and jumped to my feet.

“David!”

Brett pushed the door open, and David stood there like a timid lamb, scratching just beside his ear. “I figured we should talk,” he said.

“I didn’t know you were back,” was all I could say, fighting with my bones not to run into his arms.

He swallowed hard, looking at Brett, who took that as his cue to leave.

“I’m in my room if you need me,” Brett said.

“I’m not going to hurt her,” David demanded, screwing his face up.

“Good,” is all he said, walking away.

David shook his head in irritation, closing the door as he stepped in, even though the wooden partition would do nothing to hide our conversation from Brett. He’d hear every word and he would make damn sure to listen in. After seeing me so miserable these last few months, I was certain he thought David was bad for me.

“You look a bit…” I studied David’s appearance. “Rugged.”

“I just got back,” he said with a shy smile.

“Is Harry with you?”

“He’s at home—in bed.”

“David, I’m so sorry,” I started but he stopped me, a simple smile taking the worry from my chest and setting it free.

“I overreacted, Ara. I was hurt and scared for Harry. I knew he heard what you said, and instead of telling you what I should have—that it’s fine and that you don’t have to want me, or Harry—I panicked. I felt like I needed to rise to his defense. I acted out of anger... and hurt”—his voice cracked—“and I owe you a very big apology.”

I sat down on the corner of my bed, closing my journal so he wouldn’t see his name written there repeatedly, covered in tear stains. “You broke your promise to me—”

“I know, and I regret that. Deeply.” He looked down at his feet, his arms hanging out loosely from his body. “And I regret that of all the billions of people in this world, I was the one that had to show you what a bad guy looked like. But I’m here now,” he said, presenting himself in all his rugged and sexy ocean-man glory. “I’m still keeping that promise—if you still want me to.”

Could promises be broken and then kept? Did it work that way? Would I ever be able to trust him? Then again, it might have taken him some time, but he was right: he was here now, keeping his promise after all. What could I say to that but, “Yeah. I do. But…”

“You won’t trust me again for a while?” He nodded.

“No one’s ever hurt me like this before.”

“I know.” He jammed his hands in his pockets. “And I will make it up to you, Ara—for what it’s worth.”

I nodded. His apology was worth a lot to me, but the damage had been done and no matter what I felt in my heart once, seeing him again, those feelings had changed. They didn’t come so easy now.

“What have you been doing all this time?” I asked in a sort of accusing tone.

“We went out around New Zealand. Harry’s a big fan of The Hobbit, so we checked out a few film locations.”

My brow twitched, evidence that I wanted to cry. I felt like I’d missed out—like maybe they should have asked me to come—if it wasn’t me they were running away from, that is. “Sounds like an adventure.”

“It was.”

“And what about school? What did he—”

“We communicated with his teachers. He kept up,” he assured me.

I nodded. It wasn’t even any of my business, but I felt a bit better knowing that.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen your room this clean before,” he said with a little laugh, coming to sit beside me.

“You’ve never seen my room,” I stated. “And it’s always clean lately, unless I’m going out somewhere. Then chaos ensues.” I thought about all the disasters that had befallen my prospective dates. “For all.”

David laughed, the sound so deep and warm that I looked at his throat to watch it move. He was quite bearded and very untidy, his skin tanned all over and his lips slightly chapped but not in an icky way. He looked almost like he’d been stranded on a deserted island for the last five months, but in a Hollywood-kind-of-way—like an actor on a film, all pretty and sexy.

“I have seen your room before, Ara, and the fact that it’s clean now tells me one thing for sure.”

“What’s that?” I asked, trying to remember if I ever brought him up here.

He reached up and swept a lock of my hair back over my shoulder. It had grown since he left, and I hadn’t had time to straighten it today, so the curls were as wild and frizzy as my heart right now. “You’ve changed,” he said. “You’re not the same Ara I fell in love with. But that’s not to say that I can’t still love you.”

“David, you’re not making any sense.”

He looked at my door and then sighed, closing his hands in his lap, his shoulders rounding. “I’m a part of your past, Ara.”

My mind said ‘What?’ but my mouth didn’t move. Really, I wasn’t shocked because, if that was the case, then so much of his behavior suddenly just made sense.

David took my hand and ran his thumb along my melted silver band, his heart rearranging his face. I watched as he brought his other hand up slowly and pressed it alongside mine, showing the silver band on his right ring finger. A ring I’d seen a million times but never really looked at.

“We were married,” he said.

“What?” I gasped, drawing my hand back.

“That’s why I expected you to fall in love with me so easily,” he confessed, a weight clearly lifting off his shoulders as he said it.

“But…” I searched his face, trying to recognize him—trying to tell my mind that the man I dreamed of all those nights wasn’t being replaced by David’s face; it was David—all this time. This was the man I’d loved so deeply. Which left me with only one question. “If that’s the case, then why don’t I love you?”

“Hearts change,” he said with a dismissive shrug.

I needed to stand up. I needed some space, some air. Married. But he was only seventeen. No, wait. Elora said he was twenty-one.

I looked at him—at the five-day growth and the wise eyes. No way. He was not only twenty-one. He was older. But he was human. How could we have been married? How could we have had this entire life once when he was so young, and human?

“There’s another thing you need to know.” He stood too, standing back when I flinched. “Harry is your son.”

All the blood in my body flooded out through my feet. “Harry is… my son?”

“Yes.”

That blood shot back up my legs then and filled my fists with rage, blinding me to anything but the fury in my soul. I sprung forward and shoved David hard in the chest. “Harry is my son! My son, and you took him away from me!”

“Ara, I—”

“No, you don’t get to speak.” I shoved him again, making him stumble back into the wall. “Four months! No, almost five months you were gone. I missed his birthday! I missed all this time with him, David. How could you do that to me? To him?”

“Ara, I—”

“Just shut up.” I shoved him again but he couldn’t go any further back, so I hit his chest. “I hate you!” I hit him again. “I will never forgive you for this!”

“Ara stop!” Brett yanked me back as I went to hit David again, pinning me in his arms so I couldn’t move. But it didn’t matter anymore. The anger fled my system so quickly I couldn’t breathe. I drew a long, strained lungful of air and coughed it out, bawling into Brett’s chest.

“David?” Brett said softly. “Are you okay?”

I turned my head then to see David on the floor, having slid down the wall with his hand across his chest. And my eyes widened in sudden realization: he was human. I was a hundred times stronger than him.

Brett set me aside and squatted down by David, cupping the back of his neck to sit him forward. “Just breathe, it’s okay—”

“Ara,” David strained out, looking past his pain, past Brett, to me. “I’m sorry.”

My legs went weak then and I fell down hard on my knees, my hands catching the rest of my weight. I saw David in my periphery using Brett’s hand to get on his knees, then he shuffled over to me, his breathing labored, and drew my face to his chest. I couldn’t speak or cry or even think. I just had to let the past few months sift through a fine weave of thought until it all made sense.

The family I longed to return to—the ones that would love me no matter what mistakes I made, or what I said to hurt them—that was him? All along that was him? And yet he was the one who’d hurt me most out of anyone.

All those dreams I’d had, placing his face over the face of the husband I’d loved so so deeply—that was him. All along it was him.

But what had I done to Harry? I told David I didn’t want our son! I was hurt that David left—that he took Harry—but what I did was far, far worse.

I looked up into David’s face, taking in his green eyes in a new way. What had I loved about him before? What had I seen in those eyes, what memories, what words, what fights? We had this entire past and I didn’t know anything about it.

And then I thought about the night he sat at the piano, my tight face dropping as I realized he wasn’t just singing for me. He was singing to me. I was that girl. I was as loved by him all along as I’d wished I would one day be.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, but it was barely a whisper.

“We were afraid you’d run in the opposite direction and never give this thing a chance,” he explained, his deep voice vibrating into my cheek through his chest. “You never liked being told what to do.”

I pushed back from him and sat down on my butt. “I know I said I didn’t want to know about my past, but if I have a son, that’s something you guys really should have told me.” I looked at Brett, and he just shook his head.

“You weren’t ready, Ara.”

“But how much time have I missed with him—seeing him grow?” The horror spread through me, my eyes drifting off to nothing, tearing-up so badly I couldn’t see. “I would’ve been so different with him if I’d known.”

“He knows that.” David sat down across from me, a cautious air surrounding him, as though he was afraid to touch me and break me. “He had faith all along that once you knew who he was, you’d love him still.”

“But this changes everything. I…” I touched my head with both hands. “I need to process this. I need to think…”

“You can have as much time as you need.”

“All my plans. Everything I want in life, it’s all… changing.”

“You can still have it all, Ara. No one is asking you to be Harry’s mother today. We all understand it’ll be a long process…”

“Who is we?” I asked David. “You keep saying we?”

“Me, Falcon, Mike, Harry, Elora—”

“So you know what Elora is? I mean, of course you do,” I added to myself, “if you knew me before my accident then you must know what… wait.” I put another two pieces of the puzzle together: her likeness to David and the way I would sometimes think she was a lot like me. “Is Elora…”

“Our daughter?” He grinned proudly. “Yes.”

“Oh my God.” I looked at Brett then at David. “I mean, she’s beautiful! I made that?”

They both laughed.

“But… oh shit.” I bowed my head in shame, covering my mouth. “The conversations I’ve had with her.”

David laughed loudly, tossing his head back. “Nothing different to how it used to be. You were always very close.”

I nodded. It had seemed so natural with Elora, as if, I had thought once, we’d known each other for decades. And suddenly the secret she told me a few months ago sunk in with an entirely different meaning. My cold stare landed on Brett. “You had sex with my daughter!”

David’s head whirled around to look at him. “You told her that?”

“You knew?” I looked at David, disgusted.

“It wasn’t his fault, Ara,” David said, holding his palm out as though to steady me. “They were drugged—”

“I know that! But how did he even get in that situation with her?”

“Just… don’t make him feel any worse than he already does,” David warned.

When I looked into Brett’s warm caramel eyes, my heart cut itself in half and killed the other piece. “You’re right.” I exhaled all of my anger, thinking back to what Elora said about Brett trying to take his own life. “I don’t know what the old Ara would have said, Brett, but I’m sorry that happened to you. If I could have been there to stop it—”

“You weren’t, and it’s in the past now,” he said sadly.

“But it’s not, is it?” I held out my hand and he walked over to take it, staying standing though. “You aren’t to blame. I know you to your core, Brett. I know—”

“Just stop.” He squatted down and kissed my hand, his eyes wet with tears. “I don’t want to dredge up the past. I just need to forget it, okay?”

“But you can’t,” I said. “It’s so obvious, and Elora’s hurt, Brett. She misses you and—”

“I know.” He stood up. “But it has to be that way.”

“Why?”

“Just… another time, okay,” he said, then walked away, closing the door behind him.

I glanced at David, who still hadn’t quite caught his breath. He looked sick, hurt. Badly hurt. I wondered if I should take him to the hospital. “I’m sorry I almost killed you.”

He folded over a bit, cradling his ribs in his arm. “I think maybe you broke something.”

I pressed my hand to his ribs; he was thinner, but quite a bit more muscled than he was five months ago, and so warm and solid beneath my hand that I pulled it back almost straight away. “Nothing’s broken. I can feel it.”

“You can?”

I nodded, lifting my eyes to his again. Somewhere in that beautiful emerald-green depth, there was a lifetime of memories, with me in them, and I wanted to tell him that I’d dreamed of us—of our life together, our son, that I knew now that my mind hadn’t messed it up. I wanted to tell him I knew how much I’d loved him once, but in truth, knowing wasn’t understanding. It just didn’t feel like that was my life. Not one bit. It didn’t feel like my heart, and this version of him didn’t seem like the one my past-self loved.

“What happened to me?” I asked. “I never wanted to know before, but I think it’s time.”

He hesitated for a second, but the truth came out quickly after that, as though he’d prepared himself for this. “You were murdered by your sister. Half-sister,” he corrected.

“Why?”

“It’s a long story. But, basically, she was trying to resurrect another, and she needed something from you to do that.”

“What?”

“Your soul.”

“So I’m guessing she didn’t achieve this resurrection—”

“Yes and no.”

I went to frown at him, but he shook his head.

“It’s irrelevant right now, Ara. We can talk about all that later.”

“Why can’t we talk about it now?”

His jaw hardened, going square and taking his eyes with it. “I’m not ready.”

“Why?”

“Because—” He looked away, as if he was thinking about just getting up and leaving, but he settled back into position again and huffed at me, pressing his mouth into a hard line. “I lost my wife. I haven’t had time to truly deal with it, so if it’s all the same to you, which it is, because how you died holds no bearing on the future, then I’d like to just drop it until I’m ready to tell you.”

“Fine.” I folded my arms, looking him over like he was some alien I’d been wed to in my sleep. “So if we have a daughter that’s twenty-three, then you must have been immortal once.”

He nodded.

That explained it. The only way I could ever have loved him enough to marry him is if he was a vampire. “So how come you’re not a vampire now?”

“One of your powers was the ability to make vampires human again.”

“Like Queen Lilith?”

“Yes.” He held back an odd kind of smile.

“And I made you human again?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He cleared his throat. “You always preferred a more human version of me.”

That didn’t sound like me at all. “How long have you been human?”

“A little under two years.”

So he became a human at about the same time I died. “So we were together for a really long time?”

“Over twenty years.”

“Wow.” Twenty years with a control freak. I must have been blind or bat-shit crazy. “This is messing with my head.”

My head forgot about that for a second as David laughed. He sounded so young and carefree when he laughed. It felt like forever since I’d heard that sound, and then I realized it kind of had been. “Why did you run away?”

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said.

“Lost me? You told me to leave—”

“Yes, but before I did that… See, when we met the first time, I was a vampire.” He flashed me a toothy grin, his brows going up suggestively. “And everyone thought that if I hadn’t been a vampire, you would never have fallen for me.”

“Why? You said I preferred you as a human, so—”

“Yes, but the thing about vampires is, we are very appealing. Some say that you only fell in love with me because I lured you.”

“Lured me?”

“You know how, when we hunt, we draw our victims to us by giving off a chemical?”

I nodded.

“It’s instinctual,” he added, “and I did it to you without realizing—”

“Did you try to kill me?”

“No.” He laughed. “But after that, you did seem to fall more easily in love with me, so it was a bit of a coin-toss if you would ever love me without having been lured into it.”

I scrunched my nose up. “You know, Lilithians can’t get lured, right? We—”

“You were human then.”

“I was?!”

He nodded. “I was the one that first gave you vampire blood and caused the change to occur in you.”

“Wow.” I looked at the veins in my arms. My immortality was a result of his love for me. “I was wondering about that.”

David laughed. It made me feel a bit closer to him knowing he was technically my creator. I owed him a lot. And we had a family and this entire long past together. “So… you ran away because I didn’t fall in love with you?”

“If I’m honest, I planned to leave long before that night.”

“Why? I mean, you didn’t really give me a fair chance to get to know you.”

“I would have. I could have waited ten years for you to know me, but I couldn’t watch you getting closer to other guys.”

It clicked then—all the times I was cuddling Cal or holding his hand—the reactions David had to that. I covered my mouth. He was my husband. Nothing had changed that except for the fact that I died and didn’t remember anymore. So for him, it must have been torture to watch me moving on with my life like he never mattered. “I feel like I cheated on you. How could you have withstood that—watching me with Cal?”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“I feel so bad—”

“Don’t,” he said, pausing then to take me in before he braved a quick shuffle closer. He wrapped his arm around my waist and pulled me close, tucking my head under his chin. “If anyone should feel bad, it’s me.”

“Why?”

He didn’t say anything, so I looked up at him and caught the dying flash of a very evil grin. “Never mind.”

We sat in silence for a while then, and I went through every moment of our past—the one I remembered—wishing I could go back and let myself fall in love with him. It would make this so much easier, and then I wouldn’t have to say what needed to be said.

“I can see that you obviously loved your wife—loved me, I guess,” I added awkwardly, “but I don’t know what I can offer you, David. I don’t feel any connection to her at all, and—”

“It’s okay.” He kissed my head. “We don’t need to rush anything. I had a lot of time to think the last few months, and you’re right. I need to step back and let you become you before you can become a part of me again.”

“And what if I never want to be a part of you again?”

“Then I’ll just have to deal with that,” he said. “But Harry—”

“It goes without saying.” I pulled back from his arms. “I already adore that kid! There’s no way I’m not going to be a part of his life.”

His eyes closed with relief, and a smile made the indent in his cheek deeper. I pressed my finger to it and smiled. “You have cute dimples.”

David cupped my finger and opened his eyes. “You always loved my dimples.”

“I still do.” I studied him with new eyes. “Were we happy? Before I died?”

“Very.”

“Was I a good mother?”

“The best.” A glassy sheen coated his eyes, an entire lifetime of hurt pooling behind them. “What happened to you, to us, was unfair, but you’re here, and I’m here with you after I thought for the longest time that you would never come back to life—”

“And that’s why you were so eager to be friends—”

“And to hold you.” He laughed, wiping his eye. “The free hugs scheme? That was purely so I could hold you without seeming weird.”

“Really?” I jerked forward in disbelief. “I… really?”

He nodded, smiling. “I missed you so deeply that it hurt to close my eyes at night, and they brought you back here without telling me—just threw us into a school parking lot and let the chips fall where they may.”

“And that’s why you were so weird that day?” I felt terrible for him then. “How did you not just ruin it all and grab me right then and hug me?”

“Believe me, I almost did.”

“But you think I would’ve run away if you told me who you were?”

“I’m sure you would.”

I nodded to agree with him. I didn’t know him then. And I might not know him that well now, but I at least cared about him—cared enough not to turn my back on him or leave him hurting. But back then, I owed him nothing, knew nothing about him. It wouldn’t have even been a second thought if I’d hurt him. I would have left and just viewed this as closing the book on my old life to open a more exciting one. Unless he also told me I had a son in the same sentence.

“Can I come see Harry tomorrow?”

David’s face split into a gorgeous grin. “You can see him any time you want.”

I smiled too, holding it in place as I watched David’s grow.

“You know,” he said, “I remember sitting in your room with you—just like this—when you were a teenager the first time around, trying to convince you to love me after I told you I was a vampire.”

I tried to imagine that. “Why didn’t I love you once I knew you were a vampire?”

“Because I told you that my kind are killers and that we enjoy it.”

“And I wasn’t okay with that?”

“No.” He shook his head, looping his arms loosely around his knees. “Are you now?”

“Is it bad that I am?”

His face went from passively flat to brightly grinning in a nanosecond. “Falcon said you weren’t as compassionate as you used to be.”

My eyes fell to the floor.

“Ara, that’s a good thing, in a lot of ways.” He reached over and tilted my chin upward. “Sweetheart, you were once so full of compassion for all living things that it was almost detrimental to your relationships in this immortal world.”

“To our relationship?”

“Yes, but also to yourself, because you fought so hard against what was natural to those you surrounded yourself with.”

It didn’t sound like this old me was a very happy person. “Why did you stay with her—with me, I mean? It sounds like I was miserable and moody and—”

David laughed, tipping back a bit. “It sounds that way, but you weren’t.”

“What did you like about me? Why did you love me?”

He shrugged. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him do that. “I loved you for reasons I can’t really compare here.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I’m honest, what I loved about you before is… gone. Most of it—how we grew together and how you rose above life’s challenges—changed because of them. Everything you became is what I loved mostly in the end, and now…”

“Now you’re not so sure?”

“No. I will always and forever love you, but I need to get to know this new person.” He lightly brushed the back of his knuckles against my arm, winking at me. “It’s like dating a teenager again, no offense, and that takes some getting used to after being with an adult for twenty years.”

“So you’ve been holding on to this idea of me all this time—just waiting for her to come back to life?”

“Yes, and I think, in a lot of ways, that’s why I had to leave. I had to come to terms with the fact that…”—his voice broke to a whisper—“the girl I loved is dead. She’s never coming back.”

“I’m sorry.” I held his gaze for a moment, but in the end, I had to look away from the hurt there. His wife was dead. I felt no connection to her at all, and even though I was starting to remember that life—certain it would eventually come back—it wasn’t yet. He’d hurt this version of me. He’d ruined what might have been between us. And unless my heart remembered what it once felt, there was little hope for our future.

I wanted to end this conversation here and just quit this old life—move on from it and all the pain that it involved. But I had a son. I had Harry, and Elora. And I owed it to them to at least try to restore the family they lost when their mother died. I would never be able to promise David my heart, and I had to hope that after a few months getting to know each other, he would come to terms with the fact that his wife is dead, and move on. We would stay friends, but I didn’t like the side of him I saw that night before he left, nor could I trust him now that he’d so easily broken a promise. In my world, promises are forever. They matter.

“I will try to get to know you better, try to rebuild our friendship for Harry and Elora’s sakes, but whatever feelings I had for you once have been obliterated, David. I can’t make any promises that I’ll ever feel the same way again.”

He didn’t look up. He kept hold of his legs, one hand cupping his wrist, and nodded like he already understood that.