When I burst through the outer church doors, the sun has vanished behind clouds, and it’s begun to rain. I walk home barefoot, carrying my heels, wet and miserable, ignoring the constant buzzing of my cell phone in my handbag and the much louder buzzing inside my head.

Theo’s note was referring to my text about closed doors. The bible quote has nothing to do with Cass, and neither does the hymn. Or the sermon. Or the seventeenth of May. They’re all coincidences.

Sure they are. And I’m Elvis Presley.

Shut up.

You shut up!

I take it as evidence of my mental deterioration that my nagging inner voice now has split personalities that are arguing with each other. Magical thinking has dug its tentacles into my brain. No matter how many times I tell myself it’s all bullshit, that Dr. Singer’s explanation is valid and my grief is making connections where there are none, my heart doesn’t care.

My weak, stupid heart. And my poor, broken brain. Between the two of them, it’s a miracle I’ve lasted this long.

By the time I get home, I’ve got a bunch of messages on my voicemail from Suzanne. I’m not surprised. I ran from the church as if I were being chased by lions. I text her an apology, say I’m not feeling well, and make a joke about the shadow of the cross. Then I shut off my phone, strip out of my wet clothes, and crawl into bed.

I’m still there when the cloud-shrouded sun sinks into the ocean, turning the room from gray to black.

Black as his hair. Black as his eyes. Black as the shriveled-up husk of my heart.

The thing about depression is its weight. It’s so damn heavy. Every breath is a fight. Every step takes so much effort. It’s like trying to move through wet sand. It’s so much easier to lie down and let the sand fill your mouth and ears and eyes, to let it seep into your soul and obliterate all the nothingness.

As I lie in darkness, sinking into that sweet relief of letting go, I keep hearing Coop’s words.

The thing that breaks you is the only thing that can put you back together.

When the clock reads 12:02 a.m., I rise from bed, get my laptop, and compose an email.

After I hit Send, I feel a strange and overwhelming sense of relief. I fall asleep as soon as my head touches the pillow, and I don’t dream.

I wake with a jolt sometime in the still black hours before dawn, my skin prickling with the recognition that I’m no longer alone.

I sit up in bed, listening hard into the darkness. My body floods with adrenaline. My heart starts pounding, and my hands begin to shake. I hear nothing but the gentle patter of raindrops against the windows and the restless sigh of the surf.

And then…

That familiar crackle of electricity skitters over my skin.

He’s here.

I can’t see him, but I know straight down to the marrow of my bones that Theo is somewhere nearby.

I’m struck with a wild elation that makes me feel as light as a feather, as if I might at any moment shirk the bounds of gravity and float up to the ceiling like a balloon.

Some part of me was expecting this. I summoned him, after all. I cast a spell with my letter, one I knew would work its magic and bring him to me in the night, my midnight valentine who stalks the darkness outside my house and inside my heart.

With shaking hands, I push aside the covers and slip out of bed. I walk barefoot from the room and down the twist of stairs, my nerves screaming, a roar like thunder inside my head. At the foot of the stairs, I pause with one hand on the banister. I close my eyes and open my mind, waiting until I feel it again.

I open my eyes and look at the front door.

And it strikes me, the sight of that closed door. For all our cryptic back and forth about the damn things, there was one thing Theo and I both missed.

Some doors have to be opened from the inside.

I cross the foyer, open the lock, turn the handle, and pull—

And there he is.

Soaking wet and shivering, standing with his head bowed and his arms braced on either side of the frame, rain dripping from the tip of his nose. His wet hair is plastered against his skull. A puddle of water shimmers around his feet.

He raises his head and looks into my eyes. His face is wet from more than just the rain.

He’s crying.

Without a word, I take hold of his jacket and pull him into my arms.

He collapses against me with a groan, shuddering violently. He hugs me so tight, I’m breathless. His clothing is freezing cold, but his skin is hot. His face pressed to my neck feels feverish.

“It’s okay,” I whisper, holding him. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I’m not sure which of us I’m reassuring.

“Come inside. Come in out of the rain, Theo. You’re wet. Let me help you. Let me help you.”

He reluctantly allows me to coax him through the door, though he refuses to release me. He’s like a terrified animal, starving and afraid to be caged, but desperate for the food inside. I kick the door shut, and we stand in the shadowed foyer, clutching each other, shivering and breathing erratically, the rain growing louder until it sounds like a hail of bullets on the roof.

His hands are in my hair. He takes big fistfuls of it, buries his face in it, breathes it in. When he makes an inarticulate sound of anguish, I gently shush him again.

Calm descends over me, a serenity so powerful, it disorients me for a moment, but then I realize it’s the same thing I felt upstairs in bed. That feeling like my soul is filling with air and I’m rising.

That feeling of finally being able to breathe after spending so long suffocating on hopelessness.

“We need to get you dry. Okay? Can you stay here for a minute?”

He drags in a breath and nods, though his hands stay in my hair and he makes no move to step away. I have to gently peel myself out of his arms. I leave him standing there like a statue, staring at the floor, and hurry upstairs to find some thick bath towels. When I come back down, he hasn’t moved from the spot I left him.

I ease off his soaked jacket and let it fall to the floor. Then I drape one of the towels around his shoulders. When I put another over his head and start to gently rub his hair, he closes his eyes and sighs.

The weight of the world is in that sigh. I can tell by how his shoulders sag after he releases it that he’s feeling what I’m feeling too. That strange unburdening of spirit. The aching bliss of finally letting go.

We’re quiet as I blot the water from his face and hair, my hands as reverent and tender with him as if he were a baby. His fragility is so unexpected, his vulnerability so raw, I’m moved almost to tears. He could crush me with those big hands of his, all those powerful muscles, but instead stands emotionally naked and allows me to care for him.

His trust is devastating.

“You have a fever,” I whisper, my brow crinkled with worry as I touch his forehead. “Theo, you’re burning up.”

He tilts his head into my palm and presses his hand against it. It’s such a sweet gesture, and so intimate. I can’t stop myself: I rise up on tiptoe and softly press a kiss to his lips.

He takes my face in his hands. Cupping my jaw, he touches his forehead to mine. He’s trembling all over, his hands as feverish as the rest of him.

I kiss him again. I have to. There is no choice. His mouth is the oxygen I need to survive, and I no longer care about anything else but this:

His soft, trembling lips.

His low, sweet groan.

His heat and his taste and the astonishing intensity of how much I like all that, how quickly addicted I become to the feel of his mouth against mine.

Everything disappears. The rain, the night, and every ounce of my hesitation, every fear for the future or what might happen next. There is only now. Right now. Here, us, this.

I pull my T-shirt over my head and drop it to the floor.

Theo sucks in a startled breath. Wide-eyed, he stares down at me, his gaze raking over my naked breasts. He’s frozen, unwilling or unable to move, so I take matters into my own hands and grip the hem of his wet shirt. I pull it up and over his head, pulling it past his chin, yanking harder when his hands get caught in the sleeves. The shirt and towel tumble to the floor.

Then he’s standing bare-chested in front of me, his eyes incandescent like some nocturnal animal’s, silvery bright in the dark.

I place my hands on his chest. With my fingertips, I trace his scars, the snarls and puckers of flesh, his roadmap of ancient trauma. Suzanne guessed right: he was burned, and badly. The left side of his body from shoulder to hip is a testament to the accident that stole his speech.

But to me, his scars are beautiful. So eloquent, these monuments to his pain. It’s perverse, but I wish I had scars like these. I wish I could look at my body in a mirror and think, Yes. There is the physical evidence of my suffering. It can’t be all in my head, because there it is, carved on my skin like etchings on glass.

I have nothing so concrete. All my wounds are on the inside, hidden in places they can never heal.

I press a kiss to his chest, right above his throbbing heart. Then I tilt my head back and look up into his blazing eyes. “I don’t care if we’re crazy. You make me believe that all the things I stopped believing in might actually exist. You give me faith, Theo. Until I lost it, I had no idea how impossible it is to live without.”

His lids drift shut. He slowly exhales. Then he opens his eyes, picks me up in his arms, and heads toward the staircase.

Effortlessly, he takes the stairs two at a time. I cling to his strong shoulders, watching his profile, my mind clear, the nagging voice inside it mercifully silent. When we get to the bedroom, he strides straight over to the bed. Then he lays me down on the mattress, kneels beside the bed, slides one arm underneath me and the other around my hips, and rests his head on my stomach.

Then he simply breathes.

I touch his damp hair, running my fingers through the strands. Rain slides down the patio windows in long, silvery trails, like tears.

He turns his head so his lips are on my stomach. They’re moving swiftly and silently, as if he’s saying a prayer.

It isn’t until I feel water slide over my temples that I realize I’m crying.

Theo lifts his head and looks at me. His eyes burn as hotly as his skin.

I whisper, “Please,” but I don’t know what I’m asking for.

Still on his knees, he takes my face in his hands and gently kisses me. It’s a reverent kiss, soft and chaste, at least at first. He’s hesitant, his lips barely grazing mine, until I thread my hands around the back of his neck and pull him closer.

I curl my body toward his and take his tongue into my mouth. Desire flashes over me like a detonation.

He makes a sound of pleasure deep in his throat. His fingers twist in my hair.

Outside, a rolling boom of thunder rattles the windows. Waves pummel the shore with a wild, powerful sound that matches the crashing beat of my heart.

Then his lips are gone, but I get them again somewhere else—the tender flesh of my inner thigh. The heat of his open mouth on my flesh is shocking. He sucks, and the sharp scrape of his teeth makes me gasp.

“Theo. Theo.”

His name is a plea, a soft, broken noise beneath the drum of the rain. He slips his fingers into the waistband of my shorts, then slowly eases my shorts and panties past my hips and down my legs. Then his big, rough hands are all over my body. Everywhere they roam, they’re followed by his lips.

Breasts, stomach, thighs, neck—his shaking hands and greedy mouth map the contours of my body. I quake as he devours me, my eyes closed and my lips parted, dragging air into my lungs. When I feel his mouth between my legs, I release a low, guttural moan that makes him dig his fingers into my bottom.

Like grief, pleasure comes in waves. It builds and recedes and builds again until it crashes over you. Then you either swim, or drown. I’ve ridden hundred-foot-tall waves of grief—cresting the top so I can see the endless line of waves waiting to roll in before tumbling to the bottom and starting the ride up all over again—so I know how to survive without going under.

What I didn’t expect was pleasure that could surpass the height and power of those waves of sorrow. I didn’t expect I would so gladly stop treading water so I could drown.

With my nails digging into his shoulders and a cry of surrender raw in my throat, I convulse around that bright, burning spot of pleasure between my legs. I sink so deep into that pleasure, it’s like a kind of death—there’s nothing else. I’m obliterated.

Then he’s lowering his naked body on top of mine. Somehow, he’s undressed. It must’ve happened while I was busy dying.

He’s hot, heavy, and shaking like a leaf, and I love it all. I love it that this is as momentous for him as it is for me, that he feels the burn and power of this lightning strike just as deeply as I do.

I open my thighs around his hips. He presses his face to my neck. Then it’s as natural and effortless as breathing. A tilt and a flex and his hardness slides inside me, and both of us are groaning.

As with his kiss, it starts gently but quickly turns passionate. We’re both frantic, greedy and grasping, wild with need. I meet every thrust of his hips with one of my own, grabbing his ass to take him deeper. Starting to buck, he rears up onto his hands and throws his head back. I draw my knees up around his waist and gaze in wonder at his beautiful body, all his muscles bunched and straining, the strong column of his throat painted pale from a sliver of moonlight filtering through the clouds.

He moans, faltering.

“What’s wrong?”

Lowering himself to his elbows, he rests atop me and nuzzles my neck. With one hand, he reaches between our bodies and flattens his hand over my belly. Then he lifts his head and looks at me with a question in his eyes.

“You don’t have to worry,” I whisper, understanding. “I can’t…we’re safe.”

We both know we’re not talking about diseases.

He cradles my head and kisses me, and in his kiss, I feel his sorrow.

That brings on the tears again. I’m sorry too, sorry for what I’ve lost and can no longer have, sorry that if Theo pictured his life including fatherhood, by default that means his life won’t include me.

He kisses my wet cheeks so tenderly, I feel like I might shatter. Then he stares down into my eyes as he starts to move again with small, perfect thrusts that soon have me panting.

Everything narrows to the space between our faces. The room vanishes, as does the storm outside, as does any final shred of my resistance.

I go over the edge before he does. My eyes closed and my head thrown back onto the pillow, my body arched against his. As if from a great distance, I hear myself cry out his name. He swells and throbs inside me, grunting faster and faster until the sounds merge to become one long, wavering moan as his entire body stiffens.

He spills himself inside me in a hot, pulsing surge as lightning tears a jagged white scar across the midnight sky and my soul sings a song of resurrection.