“Maybe we met once before?” he asks, his eyebrows sloped down, his hair curling just behind his ears as the snow falls around us.
My fingers want to touch him again, but I only let myself nod, afraid he’ll slip away. “I think we did.”
“I think I liked you then,” he says.
Tears begin spilling down my cheeks, unstoppable, heavy tears. Salt and sweet. “I think I liked you too.”
He holds out his arm, and with the tips of his fingers, he wipes away the tears from my chin. He smiles just a little, and I feel like my legs might give out.
I can’t stop myself, I shift forward and press both my hands to his chest. He doesn’t jerk away. I feel the steady thump, thump, thump pulsing from inside him. A boy who is alive. I could never find his heartbeat before—his lungs breathed, his eyes blinked closed, his skin went warm and then cold. Yet, his heart had been missing. As if it were unable to recall the cadence it once strummed. But now I can feel it beneath my flattened palms, and my whole body begins to shake.
An exhale leaves his lips, and he steps closer to me, only a few inches away, and he takes my hand in his. He doesn’t remember any of it—not really—but he knows that I do.
And maybe that’s enough.
“You’re shaking,” he says, cupping my hands in his and drawing them up to his lips where he blows warm air against my fingers. “Can we go somewhere?” he asks.
I nod but my legs don’t move, my heart clattering too fast, the trees swaying and snapping back.
“This storm is getting bad.” He looks up to the sky, and snow lands in his hair, the tips of his ears, his cheekbones.
I smile and more tears come. I smile and know that maybe, perhaps, everything’s going to be okay. “I’ve seen worse,” I say, smirking.
The black at the rims of his eyes recedes—the darkness I remember from before, that was always inside him. The cold has slipped away—as if it were never there at all.
And with his hand in mine, we walk around the shore of the lake, past the boathouse, where inside Mr. Perkins’s cabin I can see him at the window, watching the snow come down. He waves again and gives a little nod, and I wave back.
Time has been undone. Sent back in reverse.
A storm is coming, the worst we’ve had all year. The road will be blocked and the power will flicker out and we’ll be trapped for weeks.
But we’ll have time. Plenty of it.
I always will.
OLIVER
Her name is Nora Walker.
I don’t know anything about her, yet somehow I remember the arch of her smile. The soft river of her hair. The flutter of her eyes when she watches me. The scent of her skin like jasmine and vanilla. And when her lips purse together and she hums a song under her breath, memories I can’t possibly have pour through me.
She is a name and a heartbeat that lives inside me. In a way I don’t understand.
The snow falls and the power blinks out and the road down the mountains is blocked. But she doesn’t seem surprised—not by the storm, not by any of it.
The lake freezes and Nora takes me up onto the roof. She tells me stories—fables that couldn’t possibly be real. About a boy who drowned, who appeared again inside a dark wood, how he couldn’t escape the memory of the trees. The cold. And sometimes I think she’s talking about me. She tells me how the boy saves a girl from inside a room, how he believes she’s a witch but he’s not afraid. How neither of them fear the other even though they should.
She recites her tales, and we peer up at the stars and wait for spring to settle over the lake. For the seasons to change. We listen to the night insects buzz from the tall beach grass. We listen to the spring flowers bursting from the cracked soil, nights growing long and warm. We lie on the roof even when the summer rain pelts from the sky, cool drops against our heated flesh. I tuck a wave of hair behind her ear and she kisses me on the lips—and I’m certain there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
I’m certain that love can be a wound, deep and saw-toothed and filled with salt. But sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes I’m certain I’ve loved her before. That this is the second time my heart has knitted itself too tightly around hers.
The second time I’ve kissed her for the first time.
The second time I’ve placed my lips on her neck and let my hands drift up her spine. The second time I’ve fallen in love.
The second time I’ve known that I’ll never leave these mountains, the cold dark of the forest, the bottomless lake beyond her room.
The second time I’ve known—without question—I’ll never leave her.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
NORA WALKER was born beneath a paper moon at the end of February, during an especially windy leap year.
Her birth was quiet—her mother, Tala Walker, barely made a sound—while her grandmother, Ida, hummed a tune from an old nursery rhyme to draw the baby into the world.
As a child, Nora preferred pomegranates over strawberries, midnight over midday, and she often trailed after her grandmother, tugging on her skirts, begging for the ginger candies Ida kept in her pockets.
Nora’s mother assumed Nora had been born without a nightshade. The first Walker to lose the old magic completely. But during one cold winter moon, Nora and her wolf found a dead boy inside the Wicker Woods, and while trying to flee a wildfire, she slipped into the lake and discovered her shade hidden inside the black hollow of her witchy heart.
Nora Walker could bend time as if it were a prism of light on blue-green sea glass.
Time had never moved in a straight line for Nora, but on that night, she learned it could slip forward and back when her heart begged it to. When she asked.
She could undo the mistakes of the past.
She could make right her wrongs.
She could bring boys back from the dead.
And she would use her nightshade many times.
Nora Walker fell in love only once, with dizzying ferocity, with a boy who knew precisely what she was. She remained at Jackjaw Lake for the remainder of her life, in the old house set back in the trees, and she wrote many stories within the spellbook. Like the winter a storm blew over the lake and not everyone made it out alive. Not at first. She became a storyteller, not just of her own tales, but of the lost items she found inside the Wicker Woods. Of the people she met. She told their stories so they wouldn’t be forgotten.
Her own death, however, is a blank spot never noted here. For time was not easily measured for her—the year and age of her death, of most events in her life, could not be certain.
But Nora is said to have lived the longest, strangest, most wholehearted life of any Walker who ever lived.
Some even say her tale might not yet be over.
That the story of a witch, one who slips through time, can never really have an end.
How to Bend Time:
Light a black candle beside a south-facing window—let it burn for ten winter minutes.
Hold a piece of green glass over the flame, casting a prism onto the floor.