Chapter Twenty-Eight
Augustine woke slowly, like someone being pulled unwillingly to the surface. She didn’t feel at all rested, despite having stolen a few hours’ sleep in the early morning, when her brain and body had literally become too tired to function, and her eyes had closed without her even realizing it.
For a long moment, she lay in her bed and gazed at the ceiling, trying to gather the scattered pieces of herself back into something human. Into something functional. But it didn’t work.
Everything was still there, jumbled and unpleasant in her mind. Theo. Their missing memories. The witch who’d cursed them, whoever she was. Maddy. The flat upstairs. How to get into the flat upstairs. The lie of it all. The lie of everything.
It pressed in on her from every direction, a suffocating weight that hadn’t eased even slightly with the night. If anything, it felt worse now, sharper and more defined, like her brain had spent the last few hours helpfully reorganizing her panic into labelled compartments.
She turned onto her side, dragging a hand over her face. God, she was so tired. So, so tired.
Tired of thinking about Theo, of wondering where he was, if he was anywhere at all. Tired of replaying the fragments of him she did have, like worrying a loose thread she couldn’t stop pulling. Tired of wondering who had taken him from her, and why.
Tired of wondering how much Maddy knew, which sat heavily in her heart, because it came with something else tangled up in it. Something quieter, but much worse: doubt. Doubt about Maddy, and her intentions. Maddy, who she’d never had reason to doubt before.
Augustine squeezed her eyes shut briefly.
Then there was the room. The hidden one above the shop. The place she had lived, apparently, and yet somehow forgotten entirely. The place someone had gone to the trouble of hiding from her, not just physically, but mentally, too.
What was in there? What had she left behind? What had someone not wanted her to find? Beneath all of this, threaded through every thought like something dark and inevitable, lay another dark and pain inducing thought: Theo was dead.
She swallowed, staring at nothing now. Who killed him? The question slipped in quietly, refusing to leave the exhausted confines of her mind. Who killed him . . . and why?
Augustine’s gaze drifted back to the ceiling, but she wasn’t seeing it any more.
Instead, her mind was now full of Theo, and images of him surfaced without permission — his blue eyes, the way he’d lean just a little too close when he was with her, that wonderful warmth of his hand when she’d finally been able to touch him.
The way he’d kissed her, soft and slow, like they had all the time in the world. She let out a small, fractured sound.
We don’t have any time left at all. He’s dead. Gone. All that’s left is his spirit, and I have to let that go, too. I have to let him go. Help him move on.
Augustine knew Theo had never been meant to linger in the shadows.
He’d been too warm for that, too alive and full of spirit.
Even now, when he was nothing more than a memory made into a man, the idea of him trapped between things felt wrong in a way that made her body physically ache.
He deserved more than that. He deserved peace.
Her fingers loosened in the sheets, the tension in her body shifting as resolution flowed through her.
He wanted to make sure his girlfriend was okay, Augustine reminded herself. That was why he stayed. And that girlfriend was—
“Me,” she said, a little unsteadily. “So I need to show him that I’m okay.” A shaky breath left her. “And I will be okay,” she added, practising aloud, making a promise she would have to grow into. “I will be.”
Because if he was still here, if some part of him was waiting, watching and holding on, then she couldn’t let him see her like this. If she appeared at all broken, hurt, or unable to move on, he’d stay. That was just the kind of guy he was.
And she couldn’t let him stay. She wouldn’t let him do that to himself.
Her chest ached, but there was something steadier beneath it now.
Something that felt almost like purpose.
“I’ll help you,” she whispered, softer now.
“I’ll help you move on.” The words trembled, but they didn’t fall apart.
“And then . . .” Her voice caught, just for a second. “And then I’ll move on, too.”
Not in the same way, of course. Not into whatever waited beyond. But still forward, somehow.
Loving him, Augustine suddenly realized, meant letting him leave, and if she could do that — if she could just be strong enough for that — then maybe, someday, she could learn how to live with the space he left behind.
Love didn’t disappear when someone did. She knew that already.
She had known it since her mother vanished, leaving behind a house full of daughters and a grief that settled stubbornly into every corner of their lives.
Love stayed. It lingered in routines and empty chairs and conversations you could no longer finish; stayed in all the spaces someone used to fill.
Maybe love was the real ghost, Augustine thought.
For her mother, that had to be enough. While for her and Theo . . .
It would have to be enough again.