Author's Note: This is the final "chapter," but there will be an epilogue after this, so stay tuned!
Chapter of the Ring
Jillian, our dream ended long ago,
All our stories and all our glory I held so dear.
We won't be together
Forever and ever, no more tears.
I'll always be here until the end.
I'd give my heart, I'd give my soul,
I'd turn it back, it's my fault.
Your destiny is forlorn, have to live 'til it's undone.
I'd give my heart, I'd give my soul,
I'd turn it back and then at last I'll be on my way.
- Within Temptation, "Jillian"
--
Knowing that time was running out, Hurley tried to cram as much of the life he had wished for them into the days or weeks they had left together. He went out in the early morning while she still slept, and returned with expensive champagne and massive bouquets of roses. Once, he even brought back two very large stuffed animals for her: a golden retriever and a black lab.
When he had trouble sleeping, he just sat there, flicking on a weak lamp in order to watch the gentle rise and fall of her chest, the peaceful expression on her face and the minute twitches of her fingers. They made love whenever she was in the mood for it, and he held her until they finally drifted off. Waking in the morning, he always found himself still holding her, having not shifted once as he normally did all night long.
Libby acted the same way. She always insisted upon cooking, and prepared all the recipes he had liked best when she made them the first time. Tastefully sexy outfits manifested themselves, the sort of thing she had tried on for him that day back in the hatch, and she would wear them every day for him. As long as they were close together, she would sit so close against him that he thought she was trying to form one entity with him, to force them to absorb into each other.
Even though she tried to spend all the time she could with him, she set aside one half-hour every evening for herself; during that time, she would pore over House of Leaves intently, despite the fact that she had finished reading it long ago. She would twiddle a bookmark of red ribbon between her fingers, but never used it as far as he could tell: she always marked her place with a scrap of notebook paper, setting the ribbon aside.
One afternoon, he asked her to take a shower.
"Why, do I smell or something?" she asked sarcastically.
"'Course not. Just please take one. You'll understand later, I promise." In truth, a shower was the only way he'd have any length of guaranteed alone time, and his plan depended on it.
"Whatever you say, Big Dog." Once the water was running, he snuck into the bathroom and placed a few pieces of clothing upon the counter housing the sink. It was her green t-shirt and jeans—the outfit she never wore anymore—freshly washed, dried and folded. There was a brief note pinned to the shirt: wear this.
That being done, he rushed back into the living room and opened the lower doors of his antique china cabinet. A few days ago, he had stashed some items there: a large blanket; a waxen army of candles; a box of matches; a picnic basket containing a bottle of Cabernet, silverware, plates, napkins and two of his wineglasses. He laid the blanket out and plunked the basket atop it before running around the room, placing candles upon every surface and lighting them, burning the tips of his fingers a few times in the process.
A quick run to the kitchen later, he sped back into the living room, his arms laden with food he had bought for the occasion and hidden in the back of a crisper drawer: chocolate-covered strawberries, various cheeses, and slices of German chocolate cake. He tumbled the lot into the basket, being careful not to break the fragile goblets already inside, and got up to close the curtains and shut off any lights that might be on. The candlelight cast a warm and cozy glow, and he stood still for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust. Before he could go over everything one more time and make sure it was right, Libby was standing in the doorway.
"What's going on?" she asked, surprised. She was taking in the room, eyes enchanted by the candlelight. "What is all this?"
He was pleased to see that she was wearing the clothes he'd set out for her, and he ran to her and clasped her hand. "C'mon. Sit down." She followed him to the blanket and took a seat upon the floor, looking at the picnic basket between them.
"Oh my god, Hurley. Is this...is this supposed to be—"
"Our picnic?" he finished. "Yeah, it is. We never got to have it, but we're making up for it now. I got the food and the wine 'specially for this. And the blanket, too. I didn't forget this time."
She laughed gently, tears in her eyes. "Hurley, I don't know what to say!"
He clutched the legs of his jeans, making sure that the hard, squarish lump was still present in one pocket. "You don't have to say anything about it. Let's just talk normally, like people are supposed to do on their first real date."
Her smile was as warm and pure as the candle flames surrounding them. "Sure."
--
They had eaten the food slowly, finding no reason on Earth why they should rush any part of it. They had nibbled on the pieces of cheese before moving to the strawberries, which they fed to each other, giggling, managing to clumsily stain each others' shirts and cheeks with smears of dark chocolate in the process. The slices of cake were touched last, of course, paired with their second glasses of wine.
"This is so amazing," she said finally, swishing the wine around in her glass. "We should have been able to do this then, but there's no way it could have topped this. You're just...amazing. I'm running out of words to describe all this, so you'll be hearing 'amazing' a lot."
"If you were still alive, I'd wanna spend the rest of our lives together." He studied a nearby candle flame, his eyes seeming to flicker along with it before turning to look her in the eyes. "Do you feel the same way?"
"Yes. I don't want anything else, and if things were different, maybe we could have been together like that."
"Remember when we watched Harold and Maude?"
She smiled. "How could I forget?"
"Good. 'Cuz I, uh...I want you to really understand where this is coming from, Libby." He rose on his knees to give his hand room to slip into right pocket, coming out with the little velvet jewelry box. Then he got down on one knee, and presented her with the box.
"Oh god," she whispered, hands fluttering to her throat. He opened the box: inside sat an elegant golden band, fitted with a diamond sizable enough to really catch the light but not so big as to be gaudy. The band was a little wider than on most engagement rings, but it didn't detract from the beauty.
"Libby, will you marry me?"
"Oh god, Hugo," she stammered, laughing softly even as tears spilled from her lashes. "It's beautiful, but...you know that I can't stay with you."
"Yeah, I do," he firmly agreed, staying down on one knee. "I get that. But that doesn't mean that we can't be engaged until then, does it? It doesn't mean that I can't give you this and live that way with you until the end."
"You're making it so much harder for yourself by doing this," she whispered.
"I know. I don't care. I'm going to be miserable no matter what. Right now, I want to do what I know is right." He continued to stare directly into her eyes, tears beginning to form on his lashes as well. "So will you marry me?"
"Yes." She broke out into a smile, lips quivering as she tried not to cry more than she already had. "Yes, Hugo, I will."
He laughed, face scrunching up as he grinned at her through his tears. She held out her shaking left hand, and he carefully slipped the ring onto her slender white finger. They were both sobbing, and there seemed to be not only joy in it, but sadness and resignation as well. "I know we'll never be able to get married, like, legally," he said, holding her left hand between both of his, "and I know we don't have a lot of time...but for now, I sort of consider us to be husband and wife. I still don't know your last name, but—"
"I don't want it," she interrupted, bringing her other hand up to clasp the back of his left one. "It doesn't matter what it was right now. I repudiate it. From now on, I'll be Mrs. Reyes."
"Awesome." He put his other knee down and drew her close to him, cupping her head with one hand and the small of her back with the other.
"Yeah. Really, truly awesome."
--
Even knowing what she had to do, she pushed it back one more week. A week was all she could really spare, and it was to be both their honeymoon and their entire marriage, so she refused to spoil it. Just one week of bliss before the rending. It would have to be enough.
When he awoke on the morning of that eighth day, he could sense some palpable change in the air before he even opened his eyes. And when he noticed that his arms closed upon nothing, he looked to find Libby fully dressed, sitting on her side of the bed with her back to him. Her head and shoulders were slumped, and she kicked one foot in the air above the floor lazily.
For a good two minutes he just watched her, not knowing what to say, his eyes practically burning holes in her back as he observed her. When he found the will to speak, it was only one word.
"Now?"
There was a momentary pause in the swinging of her foot, but it soon resumed. "Yeah. Now." Then: "I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry," he said, hauling himself up and reaching to lay a hand on her shoulder blade. "I'm not angry with you because I have to lose you again. If I didn't, like, have to, that would mean you hadn't ever come back in the first place. And I would never wish that, no matter how bad this is going to hurt me. Because I love you."
She tensed under his touch. "Elizabeth Ann Widmore," she said flatly, keeping herself turned away from him.
The implications of what she had said didn't register with him right away. He thought he must have heard her wrong or something. "What?"
"The Widmore line has two branches: the British one, which is the main one, and an American one. You know Desmond's girlfriend Penny, right? Of course you do. She's my cousin so-and-so times removed. That son of a bitch Charles Widmore is my uncle. My name is Elizabeth Ann Widmore."
He didn't say anything; it seemed to him that he had been turned inside out, his raw nerves left exposed to the bite of the air. When it became obvious that he could not reply, she continued.
"You never stepped on my foot when you boarded the plane, Hurley. I was in the tail section; you were never even near me. I said that because you told me you thought you knew me from somewhere, remember? I didn't think you would recognize me, and came up with that on the spot to cover myself. Luckily, you believed me."
"I don't understand," he stammered, speaking as though he had to fight to unstick his jaw. "I don't get any of this, Libby." He withdrew his hand as if her body heat was enough to burn him alive.
"You don't want to understand, but you do. You can keep telling yourself that you don't, but that won't make it any more true. You were right, though: you had seen me before. I was institutionalized in Santa Rosa at the same time as you. My hair was brown back then, which is probably why you didn't make the full connection that day in the hatch. I'm 'Crazy Elizabeth Widmore', the embarrassment of one entire half of an illustrious family." She laughed scornfully. "This is who your 'savior' is, Hurley. The great love of your life is a liar and a cheat. Still feel the same way about me as you did before?"
Hurley had gone so white that there appeared to be no blood at all in his veins. He was gutted; he could practically feel the red-hot incision going from just below his chin to his groin. Clearly, some madman had carved into him while he slept and taken out all his insides, his entrails and his lungs and his heart, because he felt unbelievably hollow and cold. His forearms and calves were riddled with pins and needles, painful to move but numb to outside stimuli. And still, he could not find any words to say that could convey the way he felt. No phrases were severe enough to come close.
"My husband and I both worked for the DHARMA Initiative. My main focus was psychological manipulation, and his was temporal manipulation; neither of us really knew to what end we were working, but we were happy to go along with it, because we thought we were saving humanity. One day, something went wrong with one of the reactors on-site, and he got sick. He had no idea where he was, and he kept talking about visiting some zoo with his parents when he was a kid, whenever he wasn't catatonic. He just raved and raved, and then his nose started bleeding. Eventually, his eyes and ears bled too, and then he died. His brain just overloaded and sort of 'short-circuited'."
Silence.
"I kept working even after he died. I told myself I could handle it. That's what psychologists do, is handle things. And for a while, it worked. I took only four days off for the funeral and some recuperation time, and I cried myself to sleep at night. I smashed many of our belongings in a frenzy of grief and sold the rest. But even through all that, I kept working. It was familiar, and it helped me stay sane.
"Things seemed like they were starting to get easier with every day that passed. And just under a month later, I was assigned a job. I was to get in touch with a man named Desmond Hume and give him my husband's boat. They said that he was seeking my cousin's affections, and wanted to enter a sailing race around the world to win her heart."
Silence.
"Of course I did it. My heart was breaking, and I had a chance to help someone else find love. I thought that's what they wanted me to do: to help this Desmond fellow out, and secure the race for him. I thought they were helping set him up with Penny. I was wrong, and when it said on the news that he had been lost at sea, I realized what they had used me for. They wanted to get rid of him, and I was in a fragile enough state to do it for them without even realizing it.
"I lost it; had a complete mental and emotional breakdown. My family had more than enough money to get me the best help there was, but they had me involuntarily committed to Santa Rosa instead. I was an embarrassment to them with the way I was acting, and they just didn't want to deal with me. So I got cast aside and hidden like some ugly secret nobody wanted to own up to. Just a skeleton in their walk-in closet.
"And while I was there, Hurley, I found you. At first, I only saw you every once in a while in the rec room, while you were talking to Leonard. I fixated on you, because you were the only person there who didn't actually seem in need of psychological care. You were funny, and nice, and you seemed completely coherent and in control of yourself...so I watched you. You were like a beacon of normalcy for me. You fascinated me."
Hurley felt outside of himself. His soul was a balloon tethered to his wrist by a long string rather than part of him. He was looking down from above in order to watch with a new perspective. One that wouldn't continue to kill him inside.
"I thought that maybe, by watching you behave normally, I would eventually be able to drag myself back into the business of living. So I cooperated in my therapy sessions, and I took the drugs they gave me. And then one day, my dead husband showed up, and whatever handhold I had gained back into the world crumbled. Nobody else could see him, just you and me. They thought you were crazy, and if they had known that I saw him, they would have thought me even crazier. But I knew better. It was my David, and though he didn't react to my presence, he seemed to be quite attached to you."
The balloon burst. "Dave?"
"Yeah. Dave."
He laughed, a sound that was hollow and devoid of warmth. "He can't be your dead husband. I made him up." A few tears had begun to roll down his cheeks, but he was completely unaware that he was crying. "He had my dad's name and everything. I couldn't deal with all the stuff around me, and I made him up to keep from having to handle it."
"The fact that my husband and your father share the same name is just coincidence," she said, still refusing to turn to him. "The thing that's wrong about it is the fact that he did not act like my husband. He looked exactly the same, and he had the same fun attitude on the outside, but that was it. He was out to keep you feeling miserable, Hurley. He kept trying to get you to overeat, to keep you from taking your pills, to break out from the institution.
"Your Dave was partly my David, and partly your manifestation of guilt and shame, but he was also partially someone else. Between his death and then, I think something...something got into him. Some outsider. Some other. And I can't even begin to guess what the rest of it was. All I can think is that it must have started when his accident happened...when whatever he was doing went wrong."
She paused in her speaking, seemingly trying to curl into herself more tightly by bringing her legs up against her chest.
"I told them, Hurley. I had the administration call and write my family constantly until they sent someone to meet with me, and I told them everything. About seeing David. About how, aside from me, you were the only one who realized he was there. I expected them to just request stricter confinement and more meds, but they didn't. The person my family sent called someone on a cell phone, and then told me I was coming home with them. They let me go. And after my release papers were signed, they told me something: you're not crazy, Hurley, and you never were. The people in your life thought you were, and the people in Santa Rosa thought you were...hell, even you thought you were. But you're not. You can just see things that most people can't. They said I had 'hit the jackpot'.
"DHARMA and Widmore kept tabs on you, and when the time came for you to be released, they assigned me to keep tabs on you. Even after the way they treated me, the way they got me to send Desmond to get killed or worse, and how they locked me away when I was grieving...I did what they told me to do. Because I was weak. I lived within walking distance of your house, and I traveled wherever you traveled. When you won the lottery and moved, I moved too."
He felt sick to his stomach. If he had eaten anything before hearing this, he would have gotten violently ill right then and there.
"Over time, it stopped being a job for me. I got to see you interact with your family and friends. I watched you live out in the real world, away from the institution. You didn't know me, but I knew you. Without even realizing it at first, I slowly fell for you. Then I followed you to Australia, and while you went out to find the origin of your numbers, I sat in a hotel room and thought about my life. I decided that when we arrived back in Los Angeles, I would walk right up to you and introduce myself. Just tell you everything, and then help you to run, to evade the people watching you. That's when you became my redemption, Hurley. I loved you, and I didn't care about anything but you. Not even my own safety. You inspired me to be honest for the first time in my life.
"When our plane crashed, I thought you had died. I lived under that assumption for forty-eight days, and my resolve eroded when I thought I didn't need it anymore. I knew where we were as soon as the Hostiles first came for us; I didn't expect for any of us to ever be rescued. So when my group arrived at your beach and I saw you alive, I decided I didn't need to say anything. I had a clean slate, and I could start a new life there. With you."
Silence.
"But then I died. You never really knew who 'Libby' was. You had saved me from myself, and you never even suspected it. I came back to you now because I wanted to be with you, and because you deserved to know about my shame and guilt when I knew all about yours." She turned her face to him, eyes dry. "So now you know."
She stood up, back to him once more, and walked to the open doorway. "I know you'll need some time alone to cry, but there's one more sliver of the story to be told. When you're ready for it, come find me."
She slipped into the hall.
--
She was right: he did need to cry. He cried for a long, long time.
Whatever it was he was feeling, there wasn't a word he could find to describe it. It was shock-betrayal-chagrin-grief-anger-sorrow-hatred-regret-PAIN. He scrunched the blanket up to his face, crushing it against himself, and bawled. He could almost feel colors melting out of him: the rose pinks and honey golds and tender greens that represented affection and trust and contentment and so many other things, all of them condensed into wet vapor and pushing their way out of his skin as cold sweat.
For nearly two hours straight, he just laid there in a semi-fetal position, his full weight shaking under the force of his depression. By the time he was finished, his eyes felt so dry and scratchy that they could have been rubbed with sandpaper, and a gluey coating had adhered itself to the roof of his mouth. For exactly forty-two minutes, he took calming breaths and finally thought the feeling was passing. In the forty-third minute, be broke down in sobs again. This time he cried himself exhausted, eventually passing out when the strength to even keep his eyes open was beyond him.
His sleep was fitful; he would call out as he tossed and turned, sometimes names and actual words, sometimes just moans and whimpers. He awoke in the dead of night, and cried himself back to sleep once more.
When he woke again, he was dehydrated and utterly cried out, his whole body aching and his head pounding. Without any more tears in him, he was forced to consider again her words, the long and almost impossibly amazing story of her life. She had been in the nuthouse with him, she had fixated on him, and then she had been employed to stalk him wherever me might go. It was almost more than he could bear: she had been crazy when she first saw him and on paid assignment when she followed him. She had never really chosen him, not in the truest sense of the word. At least not at first.
But then things had changed, or so she said. She had gotten to see who he really was, the good and the bad, and found herself fixated on him in a slightly healthier way. She knew how powerful her family and DHARMA were, and she had still chosen to take her chances and assist him in escaping their observance. Even if that wasn't true, the part about the Island was—she hadn't tried to contact Dave his imaginary friend/David her husband/whatever else had become a part of that apparition. She had tried to help him exorcise his demons and finally begin to heal; she had saved him from death; and she had kissed him without ever expecting to get back to the outside world.
If all she had wanted to do was escape her family, she had done it by merely crashing on that Island. She wouldn't have even needed speak to him, let alone befriend him, and that's how he knew that her feelings now, if nothing else, were real.
Finally rising, he took a detour into the tiny bathroom that came off the bedroom. It only contained a toilet and a sink, but that's all he needed. Turning the faucet on, he scooped cold water with his hands and drank deeply, washing the bitterness out of his mouth, and splashed some on his face. After taking a deep breath, he stepped out into the hallway and went looking for her.
--
He didn't know which room she'd be in, but he tried the living room first and got lucky. She was seated on the couch, slumped over to study the object in her hands. It was the wineglass, the one she had first manifested herself in, and she was turning it over and over as if trying to memorize the patterns of colored light reflected there.
She had heard him come, but neither looked at nor spoke to him. "Libby," he said softly.
The glass turned, turned, rotating in her hands. "I'm surprised it only took you a day to come looking. After finding out what I did to you, I thought you would have taken it much worse."
"I took it pretty bad, as it is."
"Yeah. Yeah, I know you did. That's why I took so long to come out with it. I wanted to be happy with you for as long as I could, even if you came to hate and curse me at the end." A pause. "I really did love you, you know. When I told you the way I felt the day you almost killed yourself, I wasn't lying to save your life. I might not have loved you when I first started watching you, but something was there. Affection, I guess you could call it," she said, one corner of her mouth turning up in a sad smile. "You had a way about you, and it was so warm."
"I believe you," he said, and he surprised even himself by saying it. She looked up at him, shocked. "I know I shouldn't, like, rationally. But I do anyway."
"Why?" she breathed, and he could see now that her eyes were red and puffy. She had been sobbing alone, just as he had been. "In god's name, Hugo, why? I just told you that I had been watching you for years. I betrayed you. When I met you on the Island I pretended not to know you, and when you remembered me, I lied and made up some stupid story to cover my ass. How could you ever believe me after all that?"
"Because when you turned to look at me yesterday morning, just before you walked out, I could see it in your eyes. They had the same...I don't know, the same feeling, that they had when you convinced me you were real back then. That's how I knew the rest of it was true—the stuff about your family, and your husband, and the institution and everything else. So I could tell you were being honest about how you felt, too. You lied to me a lot before, mostly lies of omission, but this wasn't the same as those times."
She smiled, her lips quivering. "I knew that when I left here, I would still love you. I never expected you to even want to speak to me again."
He approached her, and she gently set the glass on the coffee table and slid aside to make room for him on the couch. "You're still wearing the ring I gave you," he noted, sitting down and looking over at her.
"Yeah. Of course I am."
"You probably noticed already, but, uh, see how the band looks a little bit funny?"
She held her hand out in front of her, turning it to better look the ring over. "It's just a little wider than most rings like this are, that's all. Why?"
"I was so excited before that I forgot to mention it, but I had it specially made like that. I needed to fit something on there, and I wanted it to be impossible to miss."
"What?"
"An inscription." He took her hand and gently pulled the ring off, handing it back to her. She tilted it in the light, and sure enough, tiny letters were etched into the gold of the inside of the band. The width allowed the words there to be better defined than they ordinarily would, and she could read them clearly:
This is real.
She clutched the ring to her chest as she burst into tears. He reached for her, and he held her delicately until her crying stopped.
"You were Elizabeth Widmore, and you can't ever really change that. But now, you're Libby Reyes. That's who you are, and that's who I love."
She sniffed, still unable to release her grip on the ring long enough to put it back on. "Hugo..."
"That inscription, that's what you told me when you saved me: that you were real, I was real, and the way you felt was real." He rubbed her back. "Now I've gotten to save you with those same words." He gave her a hesitant, shaky smile. "So I guess that makes us even, huh?"
Finally, she opened her fist and slipped the ring back into place. "I know that you're hurt. And I know that the pain isn't going to stop anytime soon, no matter how gracious you are to me."
"Well, yeah I'm hurt," he said, as if everything were obvious. "I still feel, like, betrayed and used on some level. But I also still love you. And I know that even with everything you did before we met, your intentions at the end were genuine. Those were the days we got to spend together, and I don't regret them."
She couldn't think of a proper response, because she hadn't expected this reaction from him. "I love you still. Always."
"Yeah. Me too." He looked from her to the glass on the table. "You said there was still something left you needed to tell me. What is it?"
She smiled, reaching to take the glass back into her hand. "I told you already that when my husband died, I broke or sold most of the things that belonged to either him or the both of us together. Remember?"
"Yeah."
"Well, my husband was a connoisseur of fine wines. Along with sailing, they were the passions of his free time. We had already visited Bordeaux together about a year before he died, and he wanted to sail the Mediterranean next and then sample what Italy had to offer. That's why he was working on that boat, the one I gave Desmond. We were supposed to go on a romantic trip together."
She tapped her fingernail against the wineglass, and it gave off a clear, pure ringing note in reply. "I smashed all the bottles of wine he had left behind. The glasses, too. And when I was done smashing everything else in the room I could get my hands on, I collected up what was left and whole to sell off."
Hurley was beginning to understand, but he allowed her to finish what she had to say without cutting in.
"There were originally two of these. They're Venetian glass, very delicately crafted. We had lots of larger matching sets of wineglasses for when company arrived, but these were the ones we used when we were alone together. This one here is the only glass that wasn't broken in my grief. I sold it to a high-end antique shop along with some other items. And since I was able to come to you through this," she said finally, passing him the glass, "I must have been the last one to drink from it."
He held it carefully, the cool glass refreshing against his palm. "That's amazing. It's hard to believe something like that could be a coincidence."
"That's because it isn't," she said. "Not this time. I had something to tell you, and fate shifted to allow me to do so. But I'm not the person who came to tell you what you need to hear. You have to listen to Charlie now."
"Why? I was afraid of him when he first came back. I'm still afraid of him now."
"Because you have to go back, Hurley. Back to the Island." She saw him blanch, and she touched his hand. "Not now. Not for some time, and you won't be the person who initiates it. Eventually, though, you will go."
"I don't want to go back," he said. He spoke slowly and firmly, as if making sure he was pronouncing each syllable correctly.
"You know that's not true, so don't lie to yourself. Even the ones who seem to want to return the least...some part of them does want it. Needs it, even."
"Why?"
"Once you've been touched by that place, you can't just wash it off. We all used it in order to find redemption, and now it's using us, both the living and the dead. Beyond that, I don't know."
"Okay. I don't really understand it, but okay. If it's not for a while, I won't worry about it now." He raised the glass. "The glass, though...if we could find each other with it once, then you can stay with me, right? All we need is this."
She smiled once more, but it was a sad smile. "If I stay any longer, it would only do damage to you. We made up for lost time, and you learned who I used to be. You've moved on enough to accept the fact that this couldn't be forever. That has to be enough. Neither of us wants that, but it needs to be that way. It's the way life is. Even this small amount of time we shared was more than we should have received in the first place."
"I can't just accept that," he said, shaking his head. "Not when I know you could stay."
"I know. And that's alright, it really is. You don't have to think about it right now, okay? Don't worry yourself yet."
"Yeah," he said, relieved that she was postponing the subject.
She took the glass from him gently with her left hand, glancing at it before looking him in the eye. "I love you, Hugo."
"I love you too," he said back, unsure of why she felt the need to say it again. She leaned in, sliding her right hand across his cheek, and they kissed, deeply and passionately. When they pulled away, they were both smiling.
"We got to say our goodbyes this time," she said, tilting her head and looking at him adoringly.
"What?"
And it hit him.
It was too late for him to act. She still had the glass in one hand, and now held it out and away from him. She gripped it by the bell cup, and the question was scarcely out of his mouth before she squeezed. Stress fractures ran through the glass like cracks in ice, and then it shattered. The shards pattered to the couch, bouncing lightly on the cushions and sliding over onto the rug.
"NO!" he screamed, but her hand was upon his cheek one moment and gone the next. The middle of the couch, where she had just been sitting, was empty. For the second and final time, she had slipped away from his touch and into death right before his eyes.
Libby was gone.