Hampshire, Dorset — 2 am

"Ella, NO!"

He lunged forward after her in his dreams, gasping for air.

With eyes wide open, Frederick realized where he was and that what he'd seen and felt and imagined, wasn't there at all. There were no cliffs before him. And there was no ocean to swallow a surrendering girl whole. Eloise was not there with him. It was only the moonlight that cast shadows on the stone walls, the fireplace and the blankets that covered his legs. He had fallen asleep at some point, between the slam of a door on his heart and now. He had dreamed a horrible thing and was sweating, across his neck and shoulders and upper lip. He wiped away the moisture in the bristles of his mustache and collected his bearings before getting up from the sofa, before going to the stairwell.

Part of him should have been asking 'why?' Part of him should have been dying a little more with each step he gained under his bare feet, each and every inch higher that he climbed to the second floor of the cottage. Part of him should have been coherent enough to notice the small, previously fallen daisy from Ella's hair that was crushed beneath his foot on the stairs. Part of him should have been rational, but he wasn't. Frederick was acting completely on his intuition, with not a single reservation in what she might think of it.

He made it to the door of her room, raised his hand slowly and knocked.

Silence responded.

So he knocked again, foolishly, and this time with, "Eloise?"

The quiet storm of his mind and her condition prevailed. She did not speak to him, and he remembered all too suddenly why that was. How had he forgotten such a thing in his nightmares? She did not invite him in for an obvious reason. But he could not hear the patter of delicate dancer's feet coming to greet him, either. This was his sign to turn and go, to leave her to herself and find time in the morning for words. Not to pound on the door harder and throw out irrational pleas.

"This is madness," he shouted. "I can't hear your voice, and now you won't even look at me?"

He should have known it wouldn't work and should have known better than to keep on.

"Ella. However I'm doing wrong by you, tell me. But this has to stop!"

His fist went silent and his head hung down between his shoulders in agony, forehead pressed to the oak door. He breathed in deep and flattened his hands against the panels of the doorway, balancing his twisted mind for a moment or two. He listened intently to the sounds from the opposite side of the wall and could hear nothing more than a slight buzz of the wind on curtains, as if the window or balcony doors were open. He pictured her lying there, wide eyed at the moon, inhaling every bit of his anger's violent sound on her door. He imagined her ignoring him and regretting her every decision and—

And then he felt something touch his foot, a sheet of parchment paper.

He lifted it from the floor where it had flown out from under the doorway, and raised it to the moonlight hiding in the rafters. He studied the notes scratched onto the page, Ella's words—words he had never before seen. They weren't written to him, but it seemed, about him instead.

Frederick looks at me and I can feel him asking me to admit it. I want to.

I want to say it, though. He deserves more than words on paper, for this.

I want my voice. I need it.

Frederick didn't know where to change his smile to a pout or where to find happiness in the sadness of her personal pleas. He touched the pressed ink, the heavy black lines that had both mentally erased and demanded certain thoughts. She didn't just want her voice back. She needed it, for something concerning him. And he wanted to know what it was. Not later and not in the morning, but now.

He knocked harshly, with an anxious grin plastered on his face. He called her name, but received only the previous response for his demands. Another piece of paper from her journal flew beneath the door, followed by another. He lifted them from the ground at his feet and then immediately opened the door to the room.

And there was his answer. She was gone.

The balcony doors were thrown back, open to welcome the warm night breeze of the coast and the moon and the twinkle of every summer star. The curtains blew in and out of the room, cascading down across his body as he moved onto the old balcony. He could not see her down below on the beach, or in the garden at the opposite corner of the house. She had left the room at some point and tiptoed out of the cottage in the middle of his involuntary slumber.

But she had left him clues, pages and pages of hints that flooded the room, that said she meant him no harm at all, and only wanted to be with him forever. Frederick sat in the middle of the bedroom floor, surrounded by the papers of her journal that had come loose from the binding when she had thrown it across the room—as he had guessed. Some of them were short in nature but full in meaning, while others went on and on for lines and came to only one simple conclusion:

Frederick Abberline is the only man I need.

I do not love John.

I only want Frederick.

I love him.

I love him.

With all my heart, I love him…

This last one, with the words suffocated by a barrier of tiny inked hearts, was his favorite of all. This was the one that Frederick folded over once neatly and tucked into the pocket of his shirt. This was the one he carried with him the rest of the night and into the morning, wandering in nervous circles through the cottage, waiting for her, waiting for a clue that she hadn't left for good, while consistently unfolding and re-reading and folding it back.

With all of his heart.