When Christine woke, the sun was already high up into the sky, bleaching the room with its midday largess. To her great surprise, Erik remained burrowed in the mattress, his back still facing hers, slumbering and half-tethered by the twisted bed linens. His breath was shallow—mirrored by the gentle fluttering of his body—but even.

And here now, she could not bear to look at her husband. For while she'd shared her bed with him for several months, Christine struggled to recall a moment in time where she greeted the day with him by her side. Where they woke together as normal husbands and wives do, anxious over the day's trials to come, but warmed enough by each other's presents to face them. And now she began to wonder what they had both missed—for as much as Erik was made for midnight, the pale slivers of his body she could see were brilliant in the morning light. The veins and scarring and discolorations were autumn leaves, the yellow veil of his skin grass in a field. They lumbered and shook with each exhale, alive, alive, alive.

The relieved sigh that escaped Christine's lips shamed her instantly, almost mortified her to actual tears. What sort of sickness had overtaken her, to strike at Erik as she had, and then to have the audacity to feel solace over his well-being? She stood slowly, peeling off the quilt that had been thoroughly soiled by their strange and hateful romance, her free hand clawing at her face as the crisp air kissed it.

I almost killed him , she thought, as she tied the sash to her dressing gown. The gravity of such malice gripped Christine as she attempted to move through her morning routine: her hairbrush was a crown of thorns, the groaning steps of the staircase the earth giving way to Hell, the coffee she made for herself a bitter punishment running down her throat like something out of Dante's visions. I almost killed Erik, and if I had only been a little bolder—

Christine almost went sick at the thought; further revelation followed when she realized her turn at violence was more disturbing than the memory of her husband's fingers making velvet between her thighs. She sat at the kitchen table with the back door thrown open, staring into the void of the forest as the wind played at the hem of her dressing gown, clutching her cup like it was the last thing tying her to the person she'd once been. A vision of that child was running amongst the trees in the distance, weeping from pain, clutching at their trunks as it bent over to vomit in thick streams. There was a soft lament echoing through the air—perhaps birdsong or the wind or the little girl crying for her mother, spitting apologies to her father.

"I am a ghost of myself ," she realized, the sound of china clattering against the table underscoring her thoughts. " Marriage has made me a ghost—a vindictive and violent one, watching better versions of herself through a darkened glass. Consigned to shadow and half-truths, condemned to live in my past errors and to dream only of a black future."

Christine's musings were interrupted by the floorboards overhead shifting and groaning, and for a passing minute, her body went tense with expectation. When there was no further sign of her husband moving above her, she leant back into her kitchen chair and sighed, digging the heels of her palms into her eyes in an effort to stymie the hot feeling behind them.

"So much crying," a voice said. His voice. The angel's voice, sweet and sad and still as a pond. Christine dropped her hands in terror, only to find the kitchen as empty as it had once been. It was a memory—she was going to drown in them: the old dressing room, a botched run of Faust. It had been her first full rehearsal as Siebel in front of the entire company, and the newfound confidence the Angel had given her had immediately evaporated under the weight of human expectations. So many missed cues, undersupported notes. So many wayward glances and muffled snickers. Papa must have been rolling in his grave, for how much she wasted his efforts. "So much crying for one so full of life."

"What life?" she puled, despite knowing such a confession bordered on mortal sin, especially to an angel. "I wish I were dead. I'd rather be dead than humiliated and alone." A moment passed, in which Christine braced herself to be admonished. The air in the room crackled with an energy she didn't comprehend at the time, when she operated under the assumption that the angel was too divorced from mortal mundanity to feel her pain, or else was only a hallucination of her own making. But here, now, in the little house at the edge of the woods, Christine understood what transpired in those hushed seconds with perfect clarity. Humiliated and alone. It was the sensation of understanding, of feeling seen, despite the best efforts to hide oneself away. That declaration might as well have been her marriage vows.

"Oh, dear one," the angel said after a few heavy seconds, his voice distant and thick. "You will never know what it means to be alone, if you honor and cherish me." And Christine remembered the quaking in her thighs, all those months ago. How badly the thought of someone who understood also made her feel more a woman—

The house shifted again, and this time Christine was aware of a presence standing in the kitchen doorway. For a minute, it lingered there, and she felt its gaze licking up her backbone. It seemed to trace the same path her mouth had taken up her husband's body only hours before. As she heard the footsteps behind her, halting and heavy, every vein in her body squeezed in upon itself.

"Christine."

Erik's knuckles rapped lightly on the table, before unceremoniously releasing a handful of rust-red and white onto its scrubbed surface. He might as well have run an ax through Christine's neck, so acutely did she feel each shriveled toadstool as they bounced soundlessly across wood—one small piece of matter, then another, and then another, all rubies sucked dry of the magic that made them sparkle. As she scratched the surface of contemplating her guilt, Erik seated himself in the chair adjacent to her, turned out as it was to face the kitchen door that opened up into the wilderness. She saw his sweat-stained nightshirt collar and the knobs at the top of his spine peaking out from the lip of his banyan, saw the gray threads in his hair shining like silver in the afternoon light.

It was then the tears that Christine seemed to have been damning up within her—for weeks, for months, for years, perhaps since the moment she kissed her dead Mama on the cheek and put all of her misguided trust in Papa—began to leak from her eyes. A potent curiosity, one that struck her despite her guilt, considering how much she thought she'd learned of crying in the past year. As she began to weep in earnest, the scrap of a man beside her shuddered.

"I will ask you this once and only once," Erik said slowly, his voice brittle and as hollow as dried straw. He sucked in a short breath, a sob chasing it like a comet's tail. "Did you really mean to kill me?"

It was the awful question she'd spent all week contemplating, from the moment she'd first plucked the mushrooms from the dirt, finally passed through the filter of another's lips. It staggered her, how awful and absurd the words felt as they blew through her heart, when they had just as easily and comfortably burrowed their way into her head only days earlier.

"It's only—" she started dumbly, the honest venom of his question slowing her tongue, all of the air vacating her chest. "I—"

"Christine," Erik interrupted, his shoulders drooping, shoulders shivering in earnest. "Erik asked you a straightforward question… Could you do him the honor of answering it? … Without any of that charming dithering of yours?"

He might as well have forced her to choose between the Scorpion and the Grasshopper again, so intense was Christine's dread, so heavy the consequences of her actions. Her eyes were fixed on his back; never had she actually desired for Erik to turn and look at her, and now she silently willed it with the entirety of her being. Look at me, Erik. Look at me. Look at me, so I know you are alive, that you are not a ghost sent to punish me.

"Hmm," Erik sighed thickly in the absence of an answer, a hand reaching up to tug at one long ear in the saddest, most painfully human bit of absentmindedness Christine had ever witnessed. "I don't suppose I blame you for trying, even if your methods were clumsy. Christine is hardly the first person to try to kill Erik." He paused again, and another sob was wrested out from his core, followed by a chain of familiars, each as full of broken glass as the last. "Though I… I dare say she's one of the most persistent—"

The rooftop whispers at the Garnier flashed through Christine's mind, the small box she'd crammed herself into at the Masquerade, the wrenching of masks, the walls of that awful warren beneath covered in her own blood—a veritable arsenal of mutual destruction. The mushrooms beneath her mortar and pestle, powdery fine, soft to the touch. Erik collapsing upon her, covered in his sick, calling out for help.

"How can you ask me to answer that question," she blurted out through this miasma, throwing her hot forehead into her hands, nose bubbling. "How can you ask me that and expect me to not lose myself entirely? What would you have me say, Erik?"

"You poisoned me," he interjected, a slight rise in his voice matched by every muscle in his body clenching, as if fighting the impulse to look at her. Look at me, Erik. "Forgive me, darling, for saying that I am well within my rights to—"

"I don't know what I was trying to do!" The words were the first she had screamed at him in many months, and their effect was immediate. The hand that had been fighting at her husband's ear dropped to brace against the table. "All I know is that I wanted to hurt you. Yes . More than anything you could have ever given me—a wedding ring, a stupid dress, a fucking house—I wanted to hurt you." She paused, a heavy blast of air flaring out her nostrils. "I wanted to hurt you, Erik. And the more you pretend to carry on like you haven't threatened the lives of people I— I care about, let alone my own—is the biggest lie of them all."

Her husband's shoulders fell again, convulsing, as if Christine were fletching arrows at him with every word that pushed past her lips. It occurred to her, a lightning thought: more than any slight of hand or weak machination she could dream up, her confession was the real deadly weapon she once coveted, what she now bore with an agonized sense of duty. Wielding it was like putting down an animal one grows attached to, only to one day wake up to the inevitable day of slaughter—a bum leg, a rabies fever, a lean winter.

"I can't say I wanted to kill you," she continued, her tears torrential, smothering— why am I crying, when I finally speak so freely —"but I do know I wanted to make you feel as sick and pathetic… as helpless and powerless as you've made me feel, from the moment I agreed to marry you. From the moment I first met you."

When the words finally fled her, permeating the kitchen like the stench of old cooking, Christine was glad for her chair. Was it only then she realized how exhausted she was? How tired, how finely milled into nothingness she'd been? The silence stretched on, and for a moment, Christine was worried that Erik had died in the very chair in front of her. As she moved to rise, she was terrified back into her seat by a sharp, incandescent gasp.

"I wish you had just killed me then," Erik moaned, hands tearing at his hair with what little vigor remained to him. "I'd rather die… I'd rather burn in hell."

"I don't understand," Christine said, knowing she was lying—her husband longed for death as most men longed for caresses and kisses—but unsure as to what color this new falsehood was meant to take.

"You don't understand… then why did you touch me like that, Christine," he hissed, turning in his chair to finally stare at his wife. "As sick as I was… am..." He lifted an elbow to the table, to cradle the watery remains of his face in shame. "Why touch me like that, if you hate me so much? I would sooner have you stab me in my bed than feel your hands on me, if that's how you feel."

And the first time, she saw Erik as he might have been, had his face been normal, for the horror painted on that slapdash countenance was earthbound and earnest; the resentment that briefly flooded Christine, the indignation she felt as he stared at her. She remembered the way he'd once grabbed her by wrists and dragged her fingernails through his skin, and only now did she fully comprehend his rage over being so fully exposed.

"Erik—" Christine started, a whirlwind of monstrousness. "I am sorry."

He laughed bitterly, turning back to stare at the wall. "Yes, Christine. I am sure you are sorry. I am sure there are a great many things you are sorry about." At the tart sound of his voice, the way he cringed into himself, Christine thought of her hands roaming his body and burned with shame. Not for the seed that covered the sheets, nor the ungodly noises that she yanked from that voice, but for the unacknowledged truth last night had revealed to her.

"I did want to…," she started, wincing as Erik's shoulders raised preemptively. "I did want to hold you. To touch you. Last night—the things I did, they were only—"

"You absolute witch ," he shouted, standing with a force that belied his feebleness. Before Christine could even blink in surprise, Erik was bent over her sitting form, hands curled into the sleeves of her worn dressing gown. "How can you sit there, after all you have done to me, and continue to lie? I can endure your disgust and hatred, but your talents for deceit—" He let out one long anguished sob and fell to the stone floor on his knobbly knees, head tumbling into her lap like a cabbage. They might as well have been frozen in this position, made into statues, Christine wondered idly, so often did they seem to find themselves arranged so pitifully.

"I let you go," Erik murmured hotly against her stomach, his tears wetting her womb. "I let you go, I let you go."

"You did," she said.

"And yet you chose to stay…"

"I did," she whispered, embarrassed for them both.

"You said there was nothing left for you but me, as long as that boy of yours was safe." Nothing . Perhaps she had spoken truly, even if under the duress of Erik's adoration. Had she not felt like a small bit of nothing for most of her life? Eat this. Sing that. Shut up, sit down. Smile brighter, stand further upstage. Good girl. Quiet girl. Strange girl. Somewhere, a log snapped in half, broken upon the fire that baked their bread, warmed them both. "Was that a lie, too, Christine?" From beneath his unkempt hair, that sharp brow, she saw his yellow gaze flickering in her direction.

She swallowed. "Perhaps it was. Perhaps it wasn't. How much of everything you said to me was a mixture of the truth and something else?"

"I had to lie," Erik answered after a long moment, defeated. "You understand that, yes? I had to." A previous iteration of Christine might have argued, seen only sin in his deceptions. No one had to lie, or so she once thought. But perhaps that was the cruel tragedy of survival—that some people were forced to lose their hold on the truth, if it meant another day to live.

"So did I." Christine felt her husband bristle beneath her palms, his arms shaking around her waist. "Oh, Erik. How could I not have, after everything you did to me?" His breath hitched dramatically, and for a moment, Christine was certain he would fall back into his lamenting and wailing. As she waited for the hammer to fall, however, there was only a slight tightening to his embrace, a pathetic quavering to his breath, as if he were sincerely considering her words.

"I've tried to be honest," he mumbled, his breath caressing her abdomen through all those layers of cotton. "Tried so hard to be good. It is a funny thing—the harder Erik tries, the more he pushes Christine away from him."

"You have tried," she agreed.

"And yet honesty is an art lost upon me entirely, I fear."

"You were honest last night." It was not a question. "About Raoul."

Erik lifted his head from Christine's thighs at her use of the Vicomte's name; she was shocked to see that his gaze caught hers with a calmness and clarity that she little deserved. "I was, damn me. Despite everything, I would give you nothing but the truth, if it only meant that you would love me a little. To touch me like that again. To make music freely and happily. To talk with me and laugh with me, as we once did. There is no venom in this world potent enough to rob me of that."

And saying thus, Erik stood, resuming his full height as he adjusted the sash around his banyan. Christine sat frozen in wonder, breathless at his declaration, wondering how many times he had tried to say as much and failed over the last awful and painful year. The sound of creatures rustling over grass, slithering through mud, buzzing through the cool air leaked into the kitchen. But the tears had stopped—the violent percussion dead. The music was little more than soft, tentative chords, as ethereal and distant as the love Erik had desperately wanted from her, as gentle and incomprehensible as the affection she'd held for her angel lifetimes ago.

"Believe me," he said, weakly tapping a finger against the table, directing Christine's eyes back down to the heap of mushrooms that had nearly destroyed them both. With all of the delicacy left to him, Erik plucked away at the offending pile with his long fingers, until only a small fraction of the red caps remained—a humble amount, compared to what she had tossed into last night's supper. The rest were swept neatly into the large pocket at his hip. That barge of an index finger tapped against what remained of her betrayal one more time. "If it's that sort of honesty you want, all I ask is that you exercise some restraint next time."

It took Christine a moment to understand the queer expression on his face—a mixture of daring and shame, of raw hunger and fear—but nevertheless, he stared at her until his meaning cracked across her like a whip.

"Oh," she said softly, hardly knowing what to make of such a grotesque but plaintive request. A sad smile slung its way across the ruin of his mouth. "Oh."

"What a smart wife Erik has," he said, running a hand through Christine's hair. "Perhaps too smart for her own good, and yet how he loves her all the same. It is his greatest tragedy." His fingertips lingered on her brow for a second too long, and yet she could not bring herself to be upset in that moment, occupied as she was by the image of him helpless and trembling in her arms. Erik, the ghost, crying out to ghosts. Erik, the murderer, longing to kiss death, however fleetingly. Erik, who loved her so wrongly that he asked her for an encore of the violence, if it only meant uncovering a shred of tenderness slumbering somewhere between them both.

Christine sat in her reverie, listening as his slippered feet made their journey to the hallway. Just as she might have turned her head to say something—what could I possibly say?—Erik's voice cut across the room.

"The Vicomte," he said, his tone soft and airless, a feather spiraling to the ground.

"Yes?" She could scarcely turn her head to look at her husband, so much did the name pull the blood from her.

"You may write to him, if you wish. I will post it for you."

I may what—

"I would like some tea this evening," he continued, as if he'd pushed those last words out of his mouth and wanted to forget them immediately. "If it wouldn't trouble Erik's busy little so-and-so, that is. If she would find tea agreeable," he said, with a quiet finality that left little room for second-guessing his motivations.

And without waiting for Christine to say anything, so much as a thank you, Erik shuffled down the hallway, his depleted footfall stamping itself into what remained of her soul until it disappeared into the attic bedroom.

#

When she went to Erik later that night, tea tray in her shaking hands, Christine was relieved to see him lying upright in bed, his little notebook opened on his lap. The tip of his pencil hovered just above his lip, as misshapen as it had ever been; for the life of her, Christine could not understand the need to perch her thumb in that same spot.

"Good evening," she said, placing the tray on the nearby nightstand, smoothing her apron in useless self-consciousness. The gas lamp across his skin picked out his cheekbones, made the knuckles of his left hand alive like a constellation as he fidgeted with his pen.

"Come. Sit by your husband and keep him company," Erik said without looking up from his scribbling, a small playfulness tinging his otherwise tired voice. When Christine failed to find the courage to move, he glanced at her and swallowed. "Only if you wish to," he added—a transparent flirtation with casualness, yet the sharp glint in his eyes betrayed anxiety plain enough to instill her with a sense of calm. Of control.

"Very well," Christine murmured. With soft footsteps, she walked around the bed and sat down in the spot normally reserved for fretful sleeping. If Erik was shocked, he did his best not to show it, scratching away at the pages beneath him like Christine was little more than the air around him.

"Erik," she started, closing her eyes and thinking of her own strength. "I know you don't believe me, but I meant it when I said I'm sorry for what I—"

"Hush," he interrupted, raising his free hand, fingers extended. "You are only sorry because I'm letting you speak to that little headache of a Vicomte. I know you'd rather me dead."

"It's not true," she said, the tears threatening to return. No more crying. I will not let him make me cry again. Not tonight. "Why do you think I agreed to marry you, even though you offered me my freedom?"

"Hmm," he huffed sourly, the strange divot of his jaw turning dowards. "I have an idea." In that moment, it occurred to Christine just how used to Erik's naked face she'd become—what might have once been rendered horrible and otherworldly was now a man with his brows knit, chewing at his lip. He was still so ugly—he would always be, and yet, she thought of that dreadful night her world changed; Erik collapsed in her arms, crying and moaning, and the slick vein of his neck was pulsing with life. To see such spark amongst the ashes—a wonder. How could she have not said yes?

"I wanted to see you alive," she offered. Christine could tell that her husband was sitting on another argument, another accusation, by the bend of his neck, the curling of his palm. The only noise he made, however, was in the quick scratch of nib against paper. "You promised me life that night, when I agreed to marry you. A husband who lived above ground. And I've never stopped to thank you for promising me that, let alone attempting to stay true to your word." She thought of Erik, cupping himself under the sheets as she feigned sleep, sweating and vulgar and desperate, and how she couldn't dare hate him anymore for it.

"I've given you many things and you've still despised me," he murmured, eyelids fluttering as he dropped his pen, so that his fingertips might skim his forehead. "What have I given you over the last twenty-four hours, for you to suddenly feel so sentimental about this arrangement, if not the Vicomte?"

"You gave me the man, and not the ghost," Christine breathed, astonished with herself.

"A poor excuse for a man." He placed the pencil against the spine of his notebook, sighing heavily; her heart dropped. "This is really all quite unnecessary, you know. This bowing and scraping, this shower of deference, these fanciful revisions. Erik cannot bear them, for he is still the same man he was before marriage. He is terrible and loveless. He hurts and is Hurt itself. He is—," and the poor man paused, overcome. "He— I am not a ball of clay, to shape into whatever fancy that might make any of this agreeable to you."

"No," Christine agreed, lifting her legs into the bed so that she might rest her chin upon her knees. As her dress rustled against the bedcovers, she felt the extent of her husband's surprise through the mattress. "No, Erik, you are not." Both husband and wife went quiet. There had been so much silence between them in the short span of that afternoon, where only music and words—screams and oaths and tears and forced affection—had existed before. It felt strange to sit there, the sunlight all but vanished. To feel so clean of sound.

"You meant what you said about the Vicomte," Christine stated. "About Raoul."

Erik bowed his head, mouth quivering. "I did."

"And what if he should find me?"

"He won't." Ah, there was that familiar steel, that caged anger that once made Christine shake with her own rage. Yet now it only left her feeling hollow, rattled like a windowpane after a passing storm. "Not unless you mean for him to."

"And what if I should betray you again," she asked.

"You might," he said slowly, resting his poor head in those flesh-starved hands of his. "And I would let you go. Because it would still be less than what I deserve. And because you have still made me the happiest of men. Despite you're meddling." Erik was weeping at his confession, and Christine could find no need to feel embarrassment over those silken tears. They came from a set and steady flow, eking out from his body with the same consistency a clean bullet hole might have leaked blood. When Christine felt her hand lifting to catch his own, a spark of existence ran through them both.

"My tea," Erik startled, pulling away to wipe gently at his eyes with the sleeve of his banyan. "I must drink my tea." She blushed with shame and disappointment, before her mind understood what her husband was truly about to let happen.

"Are you sure?" Christine asked, looking into her lap, tears of her own fighting to make their way through her lashes, damn them all. "I don't know if I like this. What if I do end up killing you?"

"You won't, " he answered, exhaling softly. "Not with those. And even if you did, I would die that death a hundred times over. If you only make me hurt—make me dream… it is all and everything."

And so, with bated breath, Christine took in the expanse of the man she to whom she had committed herself, for better or worse. His pale and mottled skin, the long crosier of his neck, his thinning hair, the tendons in his fingers as bone china met distended lip, the contents of her scheming and misery falling down her husband's throat as easily as people fell in love. As they waited for the dreams to come, Christine only scarcely noticed how she had curled into Erik's chest, how her arm wound around his in haphazard ouroboros. She found herself smiling over the small talk that danced gracefully around the hurts they had inflicted on each other only just that afternoon, grinning over the way Erik's cold limbs somehow managed to transfer a little bit of something cogent to her own soul, even if it wasn't heat itself. It was as normal as she'd felt in a whole lifetime.

Erik twisted in her embrace. Christine felt his hands fidgeting as he skimmed her forearms, noticed a sudden shallow dip in his breathing

"What's wrong," Christine murmured, knowing the answer. She felt no fear—a curious sensation in its own right.

"It's nothing," Erik said. "Only—"

He twitched again.

"Tell me," she said.

"I want you to kiss me," he answered, without shame; that was honesty, she reminded herself. "Kiss me, before I am sick." He stared at her, daring, willing her to back down, burrowed as she was in his arms. Instead, Christine picked up his left hand, as calm and cautious as if it were a sparrow, and pressed her lips to the knuckle right above his wedding band. It was a slow attack, one that took every joint in those fingers as collateral—as witness. Those hands, the very first of Erik she had actually seen, were no longer so cold and awful that she could not warm them up. After blessing each bit of bone in them with her kiss, Christine looked up at her husband and smiled weakly. The unknowable emotion that overtook her in her dressing room found its way back into her heart—was mirrored in Erik's eyes; it was enough for now. There was time to learn.

"My Diana," Erik choked, pressing his forehead against hers, the marked hand making its way into her hair. They lay like that for minutes or hours, suspended in the beginnings of something true; then came slight convulsions—the man next to her collapsing against her breasts, the pained chant of her name— Christine, Christine, Christine —that reminded her of home. On baited breath, she prepared herself for the nausea—but in time, the agony departed. Erik's head rested against her as naturally as any husband's head might against the wife who loved him.

Finally, he slunk into the sheets and spoke. He spoke of the ghost woman, whose name Christine knew in her very bones as much as she knew not to prod her husband further. He spoke of music—of the velvet of Mozart, of the thousand spiraling arms of Chopin, the diamonds yet to be mined from her own throat. He spoke in tongues she could only begin to understand, could only hope to identify from the piecemeal knowledge she had of the world. And when that became too much to bear, Christine silenced her husband with a kiss. Kissed him against the mouth that had said so many wondrous and terrible things—the mouth that once scared her and now breathed life back into her body. Nailed him to the bed with her touch, as deliberate and iron-willed as a centurion might have been. Took every bit of his body in her mouth, the smell of sickness and vitality and the sheets she'd wash into infinity now filling her nose and mouth like the aroma of bread. The pulsing life she might have imagined in him last night came back in force, earnest and without intrigue.

And Erik, in turn, took of her: suckled her through the thin veil of her nightgown, peeled the damned thing off her like old skin, so that he might capture her breasts as they were made. Slid his fingers between her legs in homecoming, as naturally as if he had done it to her a hundred, a thousand a times over, gasping in wonder at the warmth that remained to them both. When she cried out, he smiled at her, half-terrified and half-pleased. At that moment, they were twin images.

"There is so much color in you," Erik whispered, rolling onto his back. "Christine. I mean to make a canvas of your body. Let me paint you." He beckoned to her with a long finger, eyes all lucid trust. What reunion, she thought, as she sat herself upon the most beautiful void of his face—as his arms pinioned her in that terrifying place, as those large hands slid down her bottom while he drank from her like she was a stream.

For once, there was life. There were roots being laid down in that bedroom, threading themselves across the dark and damp soil that had cloistered them off in their own aching loneliness. And while Christine still could not fully bring herself to say the words that he longed to hear, that a part of her longed to express correctly, she was aware of something new rising from the ashes of their hearts. A trellis was built somewhere that night, in that bed; there, all was green and growing.

And for once, there were no tears.