It is easy enough to say the words.
After all, the story has never been the hard part.
It is a secret she has tried to share so many times, with Isabelle, and Remy, with friends and strangers and anyone who might listen, and every time, she has watched their expressions flatten, their faces go blank, watched the words hang in the air before her like smoke before being blown away.
But Henry looks at her, and listens.
He listens as she tells him of the wedding, and the prayers that went unanswered, the offerings made at dawn, and dusk. Of the darkness in the woods, parading as a man, of her wish, and his refusal, and her mistake.
You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.
Listens as she tells him of living forever, and being forgotten, and giving up. When she finishes, she holds her breath, expecting Henry to blink away the fog, to ask what she was about to say. Instead, his eyes narrow with such peculiar focus, and she realizes, heart racing, that he has heard every word.
“You made a deal?” he says. There is a detachment in his voice, an unnerving calm.
And of course, it sounds like madness. Of course, he does not believe her.
This is how she loses him. Not to memory, but to disbelief. And then, out of nowhere, Henry laughs.
He sags against a bike rack, head in his hand, and laughs, and she thinks he’s gone mad, thinks she’s broken something in him, thinks, even, that he
is mocking her.
But it is not the kind of laughter that follows a joke. It is too manic, too breathless.
“You made a deal,” he says again.
She swallows. “Look, I know how it sounds but—” “I believe you.”
She blinks, suddenly confused. “What?” “I believe you,” he says again.
Three small words, as rare as I remember you, and it should be enough— but it’s not. Nothing makes sense, not Henry, not this; it hasn’t since the start and she’s been too afraid to ask, to know, as if knowing would bring the whole dream crashing down, but she can see the cracks in his shoulders, can feel them in her chest.
Who are you? she wants to ask. Why are you different? How do you remember when no one else can? Why do you believe I made a deal?
In the end, she says only one thing. “Why?”
And Henry’s hands fall away from his face and he looks up at her, his green eyes fever bright, and says—
“Because I made one, too.”
