He presses his lips together, and the vein in his head pops.

“I got another chance, too,” he says. “She gave me another chance not to leave. So I took it.”

“Are you saying Saphira—”

“I’m not saying anything about Saphira,” he cuts me off. “She did what she did. We can’t change that. Life happens. Sometimes crazy people kidnap you and make you a part of their personal psychological experiment.”

The noise that comes from my throat is part laugh, part groan.

“She wanted to see what love would do if put to the test.”

Love doesn’t leave. It bears all things.

I don’t know why Saphira wanted to test love. If it was to show me something, or to show herself. I wonder about that. Who she was. Who the man who built the house was to her. But she played with our lives, and I hate her for that. Isaac missed his daughter’s birth, months of her life because of what Saphira did. We almost died because of what she did. But it changed me. The change that Isaac started, before I filed a restraining order to keep him out, Saphira Elgin finished in that house in the snow.

A part of me is grateful to her, and it makes me feel sick to admit that.

Chapter Forty-Three

On the day I am scheduled to leave, I find a brown envelope on my windshield. I briefly think that I received a parking ticket somewhere, and failed to notice it until now. But when I lift my wiper and pull it away the paper is crisp, not something that’s been sitting outside in the wet, Seattle air. It’s also heavyish. My universe tilts. I spin in a circle looking for him in the trees and down the driveway. I know he’s not here. I know that. But he was, and I can feel him.

Everything is boxed up in my house, including my sound system, so I turn the car on and push the silver disc into the car radio. It has just started to snow, so I open all of the windows and blast my heat so I can have the best of both worlds. I hit play, and hold on to the steering wheel. I’m about to careen off a cliff. I know it.

I can hardly breathe as I listen to the last song that Isaac will ever give me. I listen to it while my breath freezes and smokes into the air.

And while snow flies into the car windows.

And while my heart beats, and then aches, and then beats.

I listen to my soulmate’s heart with saltwater seeping out of my eyes. He’s speaking to me through a song. Like he always has. It’s a hard thing to know that I’m never going to see him again or hear his music, which woke me up from a long, restless sleep. The shadows still chase me. And I know that when I wake up in the middle of the night screaming, he won’t be there to climb in bed behind me and command them away with the complex way he loves me. The song crushes me. Our cosmic love, our cosmic connection.

Nick was wrong about me. Having a mud vein didn’t kill me; it saved me. My vein drew Isaac. He was the light and he followed me into the darkness. He became the darkness, then he carried my burdens so I wouldn’t have to. Isaac saved me from myself, but in the end, no one could save me from cancer.

I’m terminal. That’s a funny word. Cancer can kill my body, but it can’t kill me. I have a soul. I have a soulmate. We are vapors; here today and gone tomorrow. But before tomorrow comes I want to see color—the color threaded throughout Italy and France and Sweden. I want to see the Northern Lights. And when I die, I know there will be an invisible red thread connecting me to my soulmate. It can tangle, and it can stretch, but it can never break. When I die, I’ll be in the light. And someday Isaac will find me, because that’s what he is.

I put the letter in my mailbox and flip the little red flag up.

Dear Isaac,

I finally understand your tattoos. I never voiced how much they bothered me, but sometimes in that house in the snow, you’d catch me looking and I’d see the hidden smile on your face. You knew I was trying to work it out. When I asked you about it, you told me that we were all bound by something because we needed something to hold us together. What you wrap around your soul determines your outcome—that’s what you said to me. But I didn’t get it. I though that was crazy, until the day you held my hand, clamped over a knife, and pointed it at your body: both of us cutting into your skin.

You bore my burdens that hour. Does that make sense? You took my self-loathing and bitterness, my promise to pay back the world, and you pointed them at yourself. I loved you then. Because you saw me. It’s the very instance that I woke up from a blinding, and knew that I was standing face to face with my soulmate. A concept I didn’t believe in until your soul healed mine. The darkness that formerly commanded me yielded to your light. That’s how I understood your tattoos. The ropes that bound me were no longer self-loathing and bitterness. They suddenly became you, but in a good way. I need those ropes to hold me together. I didn’t want to hurt myself anymore because it hurt you.

Oh, God. I’m rambling. I just needed you to know.

Every minute you spent getting to know me, I got to know me. Forgive me for not recognizing our soul-likeness sooner, while we still had time. The nature of love is that it conquers. Hate. Even bitterness. Mostly, it conquers self-loathing. I was sitting in a white room hating myself, until you breathed life back into me. You loved me so much that I started to love myself.

Who would have thought that day that I was running out of the woods, I was running straight into the arms of my savior? Right out of an ugly life that had me conquered. I did not choose you, and you did not choose me. Something else chose for us. The snow covered me, and you covered me, and in that house—in pain, and cold, and hunger—I accepted unconditional love. You are my truth, Isaac, and you set me free.

We are all going to die, but I’m going to die first. In the very last second of my life, I will think of you.

Senna