Chapter VI
VI
Sixty minutes to an hour.
Twenty-four hours to a day.
These are mortal measurements, for mortal lives.
But when you live forever, time is something far less constant.
When you are happy, a decade rushes by.
When you are sad, a minute crawls.
When you are lonely and afraid, time seems to lose all meaning.
Blink, and a year is gone.
Blink, and it has only been a night.
Only, it is not a life at all.
It is a prison sentence.
Charlotte watches, waits, senses tuned and hackles raised, every time someone looks her way.
Every time a stranger comes knocking at her door, or a neighbor says her name, she braces for catastrophe.
And every time she so much as glimpses someone with Sabine’s looks—her hair, her gait, her coloring—every time she wakes from a too-vivid dream, she phones Ezra.
Ezra, her only way of marking time, by what she hears in the background of the call.
“Anything?” she asks over The Beatles, The Byrds, The Supremes.
But his answer is always the same.
No sign of her.
No word.
Still nothing.
And every passing month, every patient No from Ezra chips at her enduring vigilance.
Sabine is a ghost, haunting only Charlotte.
And ghosts, like memories, have a way of losing strength.
It’s not that she forgets. She never will.
But time wears the edges off all things. Including vigilance.
And by the end of that wretched, lonely decade, Charlotte finally begins to think, to hope, that Sabine has lost interest in their game.
That she has run far enough.
That she is free.