AUTHOR'S NOTE: First off, I would like to apologize for the ridiculously embarrassingly-belated arrival of this chapter. This year has been kicking my ass emotionally and physically. I did my best, and it feels as if I've torn myself open and poured my soul onto the screen, so take it easy on me.

One forgives to the degree that one loves.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Look into my eyes and see
the graveyard filled with dirt and defeat
look into my eyes and see
the weight on my soul

- 'Comeback,' Redlight King

The cab ride from Graceland to her house was silent from the time she gave the driver the address until the car turned onto her street.

Karrin asked the cabbie to circle the block once and they stepped out a few houses down from her own, where the streetlight was broken.

"Here." She slipped out of Harry's leather coat. It was heavier than his old one but warm and soft, dry despite the rain and smelled like soap and candle smoke. Cold wind bit through her damp clothes.

He put it on with a questioning look.

"Too heavy," she explained in whisper, putting a hand on the gun beneath her Cubbies jacket. "If anyone shows up-"

Harry nodded and fell into step next to her, silent still but for the rain and the splash of their shoes on the sidewalk. Murphy kept her head up, eyes searching for movement in the shadows. Dresden, of course, was doing the same.

The prickling sensation of being watched never came over her as it did some nights, and she opened the gate onto the brick path that cut a narrow trail through the garden, or what used to be a garden. The roses had grown into a tangle higher than her head. A few stubborn, weather-worn blooms clung to the thorny vines that choked around the porch rails and bars on the windows.

Mister bounded out the door as she unlocked it and slammed into Harry's shins, winding around his legs as if he wasn't at all surprised to see him. The cat mrowled approvingly and padded back into the house – clearly the only one of them with enough sense to come in out of the rain.

Dresden didn't look at her, his gaze fixed firmly at her feet.

He could have sought her out in public but had risked approaching her alone, knowing how she would react. She had been the last person he had seen alive, he knew she had figured it out – that fact seemed to stretch endlessly between them, one misstep could send them plummeting to the bottom.

It would be easy to lose him now, as easy as it would have been to give in to the flame of anger and betrayal that kindled every time she looked at him. Easy to treat him like a stranger.

In the light that spilled from the doorway she could see dark shadows beneath his eyes like someone recovering from a long illness, and she knew he hadn't had the chance to grieve the way she had.

Wordlessly – because she found there were none that applied to the situation – she stepped to one side and held the door open.

"You don't have to – Karrin, I can't ask you to—"

This was obviously not what he had expected and she remembered the last time they had spoken, the mistrust in her words, the disappointment borne of hoping for one thing for so long with such single-mindedness that it had burned her up from the inside.

But he hadn't held it against her, would never have done something like that.

Forgiveness was its own punishment, wounding as it healed.

"Get in the goddamn house," she said softly.

With his eyes still on the ground, he stepped past her. Karrin locked the door behind them. Harry glanced around the living room, taking it in with the practiced gaze of an investigator.

Some things never change.

And some do. The bullet holes from the drive-by had been patched and painted over. The windows had been replaced. Michael, Charity and the kids had helped fix everything and tried to help her put it back in order. She had replaced the frilly furniture with comfy stuff, mismatched and secondhand – it probably looked familiar.

She shrugged out of her jacket and hung it near the door. The thin gray t-shirt beneath was almost soaked through, clinging to her chilled skin and chafing beneath the leather straps of her shoulder rig.

"I'm gonna go —" Murphy gestured toward her wet clothes.

Harry abruptly looked away. "Okay."

She took a step down the hall and then stopped, turned. Her hands wrung of their own accord and she fought to still them. "You'll be here when I—"

"Yeah."

"Okay. There's some food and Cokes in the fridge." She backed down the hall and added, for the sake of attempting to feel normal, "Try not to blow anything up."

The shadow of a smile on his face felt like solid ground after months adrift.

In the bathroom down the hall, she pressed her back against the door and drew one deep breath after another, attempting to slow the rampant thud of her heart. Karrin had given herself over to a lifetime of discipline long ago; she refused to be reduced to tears again, not when there was no longer a reason to cry.

She turned on the shower as hot as she could stand it and left her gun on the wire shelf in the corner, then stripped off her muddy clothes and stepped beneath the water, washing away the cold rain, tears and graveyard dirt.

Her hands shook, trembled with euphoric terror as the enormity of the situation began to sink in – what she had risked by forcing him to look her in the eye and what she had seen there.

It was him. Not whole and not unharmed, but it was him, and what mattered most had not changed. It was that stubborn incorruptibility, that steadfast stand against the dark that had caused him more trouble than anything. It was probably the same thing that had brought him back.

Believing, it seemed, had come through for her in the end, though she'd had to make the first step in utter darkness, holding onto nothing but the frayed end of a faith that had weathered too much already.

Of course she could appreciate the irony; leaping without looking had always been Dresden's area of expertise.

Karrin caught a glimpse of herself in the foggy mirror as she dried off – someone tired and shaken looked back, too thin, eyes red from tears. Her hair was already starting to dry. It had grown out since May and now it was a more severe version of the style she used to favor, buzzed close in the back and longer in the front.

She pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt over a black tank top and tried not to think about how meticulously she had dressed the last time she'd tried to bring him home.

That still hurt in a lot of ways she didn't want to think about – they had been close, so close.

And it had been such a small step to take. What they had, she felt, was deeper than most friendships, stronger than most marriages; something forged in fire and blood...in the most literal sense of the words.

All the hell they had been through together had always left them even closer, more steadfast, but this was endgame.

Make or break.

Murphy slipped her grandmother's rosary around her neck, tucked her gun into the back of her belt and grabbed the first aid kit from beneath the bathroom sink.

Harry stood in front of the fireplace, facing away from her. In his hand was a folded piece of yellow notebook paper – he left it on the mantel. He had forgone the food and drinks in the fridge. There was a small, flat bottle on the coffee table and two glasses from her kitchen. One already had an inch of clear liquid in the bottom.

He sat down next to her as she opened the first aid kit. Neither of them spoke as she cleaned and bandaged his hand – something they had done dozens of times over the years, patching each other up after scrapes and skirmishes.

The bleeding had stopped, and the cut wasn't deep. His hands were rough and frostbitten, but warm in a way that kept her from letting go when she should have.

He had always been self-conscious about his burned hand, and flinched when her fingertips brushed against the scars on his wrist as she rolled up the sleeve of his gray wool shirt. For a moment she thought he was going to pull away from her, and saw that it wasn't a burn scar at all but something like a liquid-nitrogen brand, silver-white, vaguely snowflake-shaped.

"Mab?"

"Yeah."

It was quiet for a moment before she asked, "Your exit strategy didn't work?"

He winced. "Binding contracts are still binding if you don't technically die all the way."

"Technically." Karrin bit her lip and considered the implications of his words before speaking in a careful tone. "Harry. You were a ghost."

He smiled hesitantly, as if he wasn't sure it was allowed. "Not very good one. Didn't meet my book-stacking and refrigerator-haunting quotas, so they had to let me go—"

"Harry," she said again, her brow creasing with impatience. He turned away, pouring a measure from the little bottle into the empty glass. He handed it to her.

"Okay, so I wasn't a ghost in the traditional sense. Turns out I was only mostly-dead and mostly-dead is, as you know—"

"Slightly alive," they said in one voice. He raised his glass in her direction before taking a drink.

"So. This is a bizarre question." Karrin pulled her feet beneath her body, cradling her own glass. "How mostly-dead were you?"

Harry shrugged, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. "I, uh. Kind of like a persistent vegetable having a prolonged out-of-body experience?"

She felt the corner of her mouth twitch. "Aren't you supposed to get those checked out if they last more than four hours?"

"Very funny, Murph."

"And this is the real you?" She poked him in the shoulder. "Not some kind of loaner or something?"

"The OG," he said. "The real McCoy, so to speak."

They both smiled again. Mister leapt onto the sofa and rammed his head against Harry's elbow for attention that he readily gave, scratching the cat's ears. For a moment there was silence except for the sound of the cat's diesel engine purr.

"You're here."

"You keep saying that."

"It's true."

He smiled again, soberly this time. "You wanted me to tell you how."

The cop in her wanted the straight facts in a chronological list, but the rest of her wasn't sure she was ready to know the truth.

"I don't know if I— this is big. Harry, this is kind of…this is a game-changer. I mean, I still don't even understand how you're here."

"Divine intervention. And some not-so-divine intervention." Dresden nodded, mostly to himself. "Should I start from the beginning? Or end? I'm not sure which is which anymore."

Karrin hesitated as she thought, remembering the fragile bridge they had been so close to crossing. "Start...from...the last place we saw each other."

"Okay. The boat. I was out on the deck, waiting for you to come back—" he looked pointedly away from her and blushed slightly. "And then I was in the water. And then I was—"

Old habits die harder than Harry Dresden, obviously, and the teasing tone was something she couldn't rein in. "Mostly-dead? Did you go toward the light?"

"Actually...yeah. Only it was a train and I was standing on the tracks. Right before it hit me, somebody pulled me out of the way. It was—" he paused and downed what was left in the glass. "It was Carmichael."

Karrin felt the breath catch in her throat. "…Ron?"

"Yeah."

"You're serious?" she demanded, even though she had always been able to tell when he was lying.

"It was him. And then we, uh." His brow furrowed, lips pressed into a thin line. "We went to a police station in Chicagotory, and he said that, yeah, I was dead, and there were some discrepancies about it that I needed to work out, and then I went to Mort's place and Mort took me to yours, and you know what happened next."

He was leaving something out, something important. She took a breath, quelling the urge to ask what would put an expression like that on his face, reminded herself that he trusted her and would tell her when he could.

"Then there was that nasty business with Corpsetaker. And then I woke up on the island and my new boss was doing her Annie Wilkes impression."

Karrin cringed as the image of the last Winter Knight, crucified in ice for betraying his queen, crept unbidden from her memory.

He saw her expression and nodded. "It was… kind of awful."

"And that's where you've been? On the island? That island?"

Harry shook his head. "In Winter."

"Since May?"

"Yeah, but time is different in the Nevernever, remember? It's only been a few weeks. Felt like a lot longer, though. The Fae have no appreciation for sarcasm."

Dozens of words and phrases flickered through her head as she tried to find the appropriate response.

Betrayal weighed in first.

"Harry. You lied to me. What you said in Tilly's office—"

"I know what I said. But you've got to believe me, Karrin, I didn't know what I was saying."

"What do you mean-"

"Just – follow me, here. I guess somebody told you about the fire, right?

"Sanya said you were hurt. Paralyzed."

"I was. I was in really bad shape, and I knew I had to make a deal." His fingers drummed anxiously against the arm of the sofa. "And that's where the not-so-divine intervention comes in."

Harry didn't elaborate, but when she met his gaze, he nodded.

"The Nickleheads." Her throat tightened her words down to a whisper. "I thought they weren't allowed to interfere like that."

"Somebody on that side of the fence broke the rules. The other side sent me back to redress the balance." Anger began to edge into his tone. "All it took was a nudge in that direction to make me think it was my idea. I already thought that if I signed on with her I'd end up like Slate, and I couldn't – I didn't want to lose myself, I didn't want you to see that—"

Murphy knew what it felt like to have someone get inside her head, to shake her down until nothing was left but terror and hopelessness. It had happened more than once.

Her stomach turned, knowing what his next words would be.

"...So I called Kincaid and gave him the mark."

"Harry," she said, unable to keep the pain from her voice as her face tipped into her hands. He continued flatly, looking pointedly away from her as she watched through a fence of splayed fingers and blonde hair.

"But you knew that already. After I called him, then I—" he tapped a finger against his temple, "I had Molly edit that part out before I made the deal with Mab."

"Christ," she breathed with a sick sense of relief as the jumbled mess of facts and suspicions in her head finally began to coalesce.

"I know," he whispered, guilt in the lines of his face. "I know."

This part, she knew, was going to hurt the most: coming to terms with the fact that he was mortal. Fallible.

Karrin wanted to hate him for it. But this was someone she had loved, trusted, defended and fought alongside, and every time she looked at him, her heart broke a little more.

"You're an idiot, Harry," she said, gently.

"Yes. And?"

"Isn't stubborn jackass one of your middle names? If you think some faerie bimbo can change that, you got another thing coming."

He snorted and took a long pull from the glass."Yeah. Figured that one out a little late."

A silence slightly less tense than before eased between them.

"Listen, Harry. About before." The apology she had whispered every night since May, hoping he could hear her, forced its way to her lips. "I waited for so long for you to show. And when you did, I— I didn't believe it. It's not that I didn't want to. I couldn't. I tried and I couldn't force myself believe you were d—until the end, when Butters said you were gone."

"You were right, though."

"How was I supposed to know?" She ran a hand through her hair and stared at the floor. "Jesus. The things I said—"

"Murph, you did exactly what I would have told you to do."

Blaming him could have been easy – it was his fault she could believe the impossible. How could she not, after everything they had been through?

"I thought that…when it occurred to me that maybe you had planned it, I thought—" she paused and and traced the edge of her empty glass, drawing a deep breath, "I thought I had let you down. That I had missed something, that maybe I could have said or done something, anything…"

Dresden stared at her for a moment, stricken, and she wondered if he had put her on the same pedestal she had reserved for him, wondered if he was finally seeing her as the girl who never had anyone to show up for her, and so had to learn to fight all of her battles alone.

"No, that's not—hell's bells, Karrin." He looked away and when he spoke again it was with a voice that shook. "God. I fucked up big this time. This—I know this is difficult and I'll understand if this is it—"

"Don't," she said calmly, silencing him with a hand against his cheek, gently turning his face toward hers. "Don't you dare, because if you go all 'here's lookin' at you, kid' on me, I will kick your ass so hard you'll wish you really were dead, do you understand?

Dark eyes locked on hers for a second time that night and the abrupt realization of just how close they were kicked her heart into overdrive.

Shocking, heightened sensation bloomed through her and she could still taste tears on her own lips, feel the almost-painful bite of the stubble on his jaw against her palms. Focus slipped because of the way his eyes drew her in and held her as a complicit prisoner. She noticed the slight tremble of his lower lip when she whispered his name again and breathed against the violent pressure in her chest that made this moment feel as if nothing existed beyond them, that the universe had collapsed around them.

She heard herself saying the words even before they were formed in her mind.

"I never—not for a second did I ever give up hope that you might come back. Not when I wanted to give up. Not when everyone told me I should and not when I pretended like I had. I never stopped waiting and if you give up now, it would have been for nothing." She took his bandaged hand between both of hers. "Everything we've worked for would be in vain. And I can't allow that."

Harry seized her by both shoulders and pulled her against his chest. He sighed into her hair and pressed a split-second kiss to her forehead, arms tightening around her.

"I really hoped that's what you might say."

They clung to each other like frightened children. She didn't know if he was aware of how close they were or how long they stayed that way. After such a long drought of affection, it felt right.

After a moment, though, she pushed away, afraid of what she might do if she stayed so close for much longer.

"Sorry I almost shot you in the face."

"It's okay."

Her hands refused to let go of him, though, and she edged the collar of his gray wool shirt out of the way to read the screen-printed tee beneath it.

"Popular demand, huh?"

"It was a gift."

"A gift?"

"Lea went on a shopping spree." Harry nodded when she raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, I know. The words 'Lea' and 'spree' sound like 'killing' should be in there somewhere."

"What, no conquistador armor this time?" Karrin asked and bit her lip, immediately wishing she could take the words back.

Harry gave her a thoughtful look, and then grinned.

"That's exactly what I said."

Thank you for your patience, dear readers.