When Mara woke into the dream that night, Davy was not in the bed beside her but sitting across the room, by the open window. The air wafting through the gauzy curtains smelled of spring–damp and sweet.

“Morning,” she yawned, stretching her arms over her head. “Come back to bed?”

He was dressed for it. Or, rather, not dressed for it, in nothing but a pair of soft pants, his hair flattened on one side and wild on top. He sat in the window seat, and the curtains brushed his bare arm, the side of his bent leg as they billowed inward with the breeze.

“Not right now.” He didn’t look at her, his gaze turned to something distant out the window.

“Davy?” She sat up, clutching the sheets to her chest. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he said, the cadence of the declaration unmistakably terse.

“You’re upset.” Wrapping the sheets around herself, she shuffled over to the window seat and leaned her hip against the ledge, next to his. “Tell me,” she urged, smoothing a hand down his leg.

“I’m fine.”

“Liar.”

He turned away from the window to face her, and she bit the inside of her lip when his glassy, red-rimmed eyes met hers.

“My love,” she whispered, framing his face in her hands. “What is it?”

Wrapping his fingers around her right wrist, he turned his face toward her hand and pressed a kiss to the center of her palm. Closed his eyes. Whispered his secret to her fingers as she had whispered her own to his that first night in Ashfall.

“You’re going to forget me.”

“No,” she gasped. The denial exploded out of her, as if he’d punched her in the stomach. “Davy, no. I won’t.”

“You will.”

“I won’t.”

A tear broke loose from the corner of his eye and darted down over his cheek before evaporating. Another followed, and she bent to kiss it away. “I won’t,” she said again, salt on her tongue. “I promise you, I won’t.”

“Your life keeps going on, Mara, and I’m not there.”

“That’s true.” She pushed at his side until he moved over in the seat, and she squeezed herself up onto the ledge beside him, hugging his arm and resting her head on his shoulder. After a moment, she felt the pressure of his head atop hers. Tacet acquiescence to her comfort. “But that doesn’t mean I’ll forget you. It only makes me miss you more.”

“Every time you need me and I’m not there….” He trailed off with a physical shudder, and she pressed herself closer, clinging to his arm like it was the only thing between her and a plummet to her death. “I want to be there, Mara. You have questions, you’re frightened, you’re tired, you’re sad. You’re alone in the dark.”

As he said the words, the bright spring daylight blinked out. The room disappeared. Mara looked down, and found herself garbed not in fine cotton sheets but in her walking gear. For a disorienting moment, she thought she must have dozed off during her guard shift and now woken, but… no. She’d gone to sleep in her room in Cinder, and this wasn’t quite real. The sounds of the forest were dull, the cold known rather than felt.

And Davy sat beside her, illuminated half by silver moonlight and half by the muted red glow of a darknight fire.

He had the appearance of a man who had been on the road for weeks on end–dressed in worn traveling clothes, his hair overgrown. In the muted glow and dancing shadows, dressed so differently from how she was used to seeing him, his face shielded by beard growth… for a moment, he could have been Eli. Then he turned to her, eyes bright and familiar, and he was Davy.

“I should be with you here,” he said.

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Mara studied the fuzzy red haze over the fire, unsure what to say. If he knew about this–about her sitting in the dark during her guardshifts–then he ought to know that this scene was incomplete. She was never alone in the dark, not truly.

“Are you upset because I’m alone?” she asked, realization dawning. “Or are you upset because I’m not?”

His answer came quick and sharp. “That’s not fair.”

“Why?”

“You’re accusing me of being jealous.”

“It seems to me that you are jealous, Davy! You’re not afraid I’m going to forget you, because you know well that I could never. You’re afraid I’m going to move on.”

All the fight went out of the air, the tension deflating with a heavy sigh. Mara let the silence stretch, because it wasn’t her silence to fill.

Finally, Davy spoke, his voice flat and defeated. “Will you?”

It almost brought her anger back, his asking such a question of her. Her grief was still so new, so overpowering. Though she knew, in her mind, that many widows before her had survived such a loss, it still didn’t feel in her heart as if she would be one of them. How dare he assume that she knew what life looked like on the far side of this yawning chasm when she hadn’t even finished falling into it?

“Davy…” She swallowed her anger, not because it was unjust but because what use would there be in picking a fight with a dream? Instead, she answered with all the honest love she could muster. “Davy, my love, I don’t know. It doesn’t feel as if I’ll move on. It feels as if each day without you my heart beats slower. Like I’m dying too, just not as quickly.”

He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and burying his face in his hands. “I don’t want that.”

“I know.” She scooted her pack closer to his and looped her arms around his waist, head once more on his shoulder. “And I don’t think I will die. I wouldn’t do that to Nick. But love… I can’t predict whether my heart will heal from this, or what it’ll beat for if it does.”

“I know.” Sitting up straighter, he wrapped a strong arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “I’m sorry. You have enough to worry over without me ruining your sleep. I’m meant to be comforting you.”

“Don’t be silly,” she teased, squeezing him harder. “We don’t hide from each other. I don’t want that to change, just because–”

“Just because I’m dead?”

“Davy! You–” can’t say that, she would have finished. But before she could scold him, the night gave way to a soft bed and Nick bouncing on his knees beside her, yanking on the sleeve of her shirt.

Mara rose, bleary eyed, and prepared herself and her son for the day. She brushed their hair, cleaned their teeth, washed their faces, and got them dressed.

All the while, her mind slowly transitioned from the intimacy of the dream back to the busy requirements of reality. As much as she wanted to spend the day in bed, pondering Davy’s worries and the possible outcomes of her own broken heart, there was no time. She needed to find food. She needed to conjure some way to entertain Nick during a day indoors. She needed to go with Eli for supplies, and talk to Lori and Becca, whom she liked and, consequently, wanted to know better.

She needed answers to her questions about the rebellion–answers she would never get from Davy. Even in life, unhampered by the arbitrary rules of whatever overbearing overseer controlled their nightly visitations, he hadn’t been forthcoming with rebel information. In death, he was a book with all the pertinent pages glued together.

Footsteps creaked across the floor of the adjoining room. Mara went to the door, which she’d pulled shut and locked upon rising so Nick wouldn’t go barreling through, and knocked. Several seconds later, Eli pulled it open.

She opened her mouth to say good morning, but what came out instead was an alarmed, “Are you alright?”

He did not look like a man who’d just had a proper night’s rest for the first time in weeks. He looked like he’d just returned from a night at the debauched southern quarter–eyes bloodshot and sunken, skin sallow.

“I’m fine,” he said, bending to pick up the rabid child who had been attempting to climb his pant leg. “How did you sleep?”

“Better than you, it looks like,” Mara said with a wince.

“I don’t sleep well indoors.” Before Mara could point out how inadequate that answer was to explain his appearance, he went on, shifting Nick from one arm to the other. “Becca just stopped by. She’s off to work, but we can join Lori and Adeline for breakfast if you like.”

Mara narrowed her eyes, conveying with her expression that she wasn’t stupid, she knew he was deliberately evading her concern, and she wouldn’t be so easily distracted.

Eli raised his eyebrows, conveying with his expression that he wasn’t stupid either, he just didn’t have time to creatively evade her concern, but she was a fool if she thought this was a battle she could win.

Mara pressed her lips together.

Eli smirked.

Mara sighed. At the end of the day, what right did she have to pester him about the quality of his sleep? She certainly wasn’t forthcoming with the pertinent details about her own.

“Breakfast with Lori and Adeline sounds perfect,” she said through a fixed smile. Let him enjoy his victory. If he thought it would be a peaceful meal, he was mistaken.

Mara had questions.