“Promise me we'll stay together, okay?" His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. "You and me.""I promise," I say.Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: "Don't believe her.”

“Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: “Don’t believe her.”The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pressure and chaos. My head is about to explode.He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a smalltattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes—once a sweet, melted brown,like syrup—have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.Alex.”

“Kent?" I say, and my voice seems to have to rise from inside the fog, taking forever to get from my brain to my mouth."Yeah?""Promise you'll stay here with me?" I say."I promise," he whispers.”

“Stop!” His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. “Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that—what we felt, what it meant—that’s done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.”“Alex!”He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never loved you.”The air goes. Everything goes. “I don’t believe you.” I’m crying so hard, I can hardly speak. He takes one step toward me. And now I don’t recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. “It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened.”

“I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand."I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again."I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand."Go," he says.”

“Lena.” Alex’s voice is stronger, more forceful now, and it finally stops me.He turns so that we’re face-to-face. At that moment my shoes skim off the sandbottom, and I realize that the water is lapping up to my neck. The tide is comingin fast. “Listen to me. I’m not who—I’m not who you think I am.”I have to fight to stand. All of a sudden the currents tug and pull at me. It’salways seemed this way. The tide goes out a slow drain, comes back in a rush.“What do you mean?”His eyes—shifting gold, amber, an animal’s eyes—search my face, andwithout knowing why, I’m scared again. “I was never cured,” he says. For amoment I close my eyes and imagine I’ve misheard him, imagine I’ve onlyconfused the shushing of the waves for his voice. But when I open my eyes he’sstill standing there, staring at me, looking guilty and something else—sad,maybe?—and I know I heard correctly. He says, “I never had the procedure.”“You mean it didn’t work?” I say. My body is tingling, going numb, and Irealize then how cold it is. “You had the procedure and it didn’t work? Like whathappened to my mom?”“No, Lena. I—” He looks away, squinting, says under his breath, “I don’tknow how to explain.”

“I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again”