After Aggie went to bed, I washed the dinner dishes by hand, telling myself it was simply because there were so few, and running the dishwasher seemed like a waste. When really it was because the window over the kitchen sink afforded me a clear view of the carriage house.

I finished just after nine and still Nick hadn’t returned. I scrubbed down the counters. The table. I swept. I emptied the trash. I returned to the window. I stared at the carriage house until my eyes burned.

By ten o’clock, I had convinced myself I’d imagined Nick.

By eleven o’clock, I’d gone to bed, only to get back up and tiptoe to Aggie’s sewing room. I set a chair in front of the window that looked out over the backyard and resumed my post.

I stared at the carriage house.

I stared some more.

The windows were dark. Nothing moved.

My chest grew heavy with waiting.

The minutes turned into hours. The hours into agonizing days.

He would come back.

Please come back.

Why did I want him to come back?

What would I do if he didn’t?

For the past six years, I’d been trying so hard to make sense of what had happened to me. How it had ended. How Nick fit into it.

I’d tried telling myself I’d heal from the wounds. The physical ones. The emotional ones. The wounds that didn’t even have a label. But as the years went on, they still felt wide open and festering. I felt like I’d never be right again.

Nick’s arrival was a stitch in the gash, and a little part of me felt real again.

He had to come back.

I pulled my legs up, propping my feet on the edge of the chair, my arms wrapped around my knees. I glanced at the clock hanging above Aggie’s sewing desk, and the hands marked midnight.

He was never coming back.

Movement out of the corner of my eye pulled me to the window.

Nick crossed the pool of light cast by the carriage house’s exterior light, his steps slow and unsteady. He paused at the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the house.

I drew back, into the shadows, my heart pressing hot against my ribs.

He had come back.

He was real.

I was real.

I was real.

Dr. Sedwick’s office was above my favorite New Age shop and had the distinct smell of oils and burning incense that permeated the floors. It was a small office, with heavy leather furniture and enough books stuffed in glass-fronted cabinets to start a library.

I’d been to several therapists over the years, and Dr. Sedwick’s office was definitely my favorite. It was warm and cozy and felt like a father’s study, or at least what I imagined a father’s study to feel like.

Mine had never had one. In fact, my dad had never been around much at all. He and Mom had divorced when I was four, and then he dove into his work, traveling so much, I rarely saw him.

When I found out he’d killed himself while Mom and I had been held captive, I’d been numb to the news. I hadn’t seen Dad for months before I’d disappeared. It was like his death was a secondhand story I’d heard from a friend—the loss theirs, not mine.

I still felt guilty about not missing him.

“Good morning, Elizabeth,” Dr. Sedwick said when I stepped inside.

I’d been seeing Dr. Sedwick for over a year now, and though I always doubted the effectiveness of talking about my problems, I did feel lighter when I finished a session with him.

“Morning,” I replied, and made my way for the leather couch. I always sat on the right-hand side, wedged in the crook of the arm, the plaid throw draped over the couch a comforting warmth behind me.

“Give me one second.” He made a few more notes in his notebook before closing it and shutting the door. He came around the desk and sat in the leather chair across from me, a new notebook propped on his lap.

“How are you today?” he asked.

We started every session this way. My first time seeing him I’d said, “I’m fine.” I’d learned that when people asked me how I was, fine was what they wanted to hear.

Dr. Sedwick had seen straight through my BS, and asked me again, with a quirk of his eyebrow, a flicker of a smile. And he kept asking until I told him how I really was.

Now I cut straight to the truth.

“Confused. Happier. Hopeful.”

“Go on.”

I shrugged. “For the first time in a long time I feel like what happened in the past might finally start to make sense.”

He pursed his lips and nodded as he scribbled something in the notebook.

“So that’s where the hope comes from?” he asked. “And the happiness?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Hope is a powerful thing. It’s like…” He trailed off and stared out the window, eyes narrowed against the sunlight. “Well, it’s like the flame in the darkness. You know?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“So where does the confusion come in?”

I raked my teeth over my bottom lip. Should I bring up Nick?

Dr. Sedwick beat me to it, though.

“Does this have anything to do with the boy staying at your house?”

I raised my brows. “Did Aggie call you already?”

He smiled. “You know how she is. She’s concerned.”

A clock ticked above the fireplace.

“Yes,” I answered. “All of the above has to do with him, actually.”

“He’s helping you figure out your past?”

“Yes.”

“Who is he, exactly?”