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He looks at me, and his eyes are so pleading, so devastated, I’m amazed he doesn’t shatter into a million pieces, forever lost on this shore.
“Please don’t lie to me,” I say.
“I won’t.” He turns away, and I think that’s all he’s going tosay, but then he speaks again. “I will tell you every single detail until you’re convinced that this is something worth fighting for.”
I consider him. He’s raw and rough, sharp around the edges and angry, but he’s willing to share everything with me, knowing it won’t make me remember. He’s willing to be hurt all over again as he shares details of his life that mean nothing to me and everything to him.
“That’s why I’m here,” I say, my words quiet and unsteady. “To fight for something I once believed in more than anything else.”
“Okay,” he says, walking up the shore to a stretch of grass. He sits down, and I sit next to him, watching him as he decides how to start. We’re so close, mere inches between us, and I see the way his body tenses at my nearness.
“Can dark magic undo a memory eraser?” I ask quietly, barely a whisper. He has helped me before; maybe he can help me again.
He exhales, and it sounds defeated. “I talked to my dad about it. We spent hours going through grimoires, but the mind is a delicate thing. Any spell we tried would have to interact with the memory eraser in the exact right way, but we don’t know what all went into it, which would make crafting a spell to undo it exceedingly difficult. If we got it wrong, it could erase your memory altogether or even create memories that never happened. There would be no way for us to test it beforehand. It’s too risky.”
I nod, taking in his words. “Thank you for looking into it. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did.”
Neither of us speaks, the weight of my forgotten memories heavy between us. Then Wolfe picks up a small stone and heaves it into the water.
“Fuck, Mortana,” he says, covering his face with his hands. He takes a violent, shaking breath, and I want to comfort him in some way, say something to stop the pain he’s in.
Slowly, so slowly, I pull his hands away from his face. He looks at me, surprised, red splotches on his skin and eyes swollen. My fingers drift to his chin, and I lean into him, close to his ear.
“I want to remember,” I whisper. “Help me.”
I lean back and keep my eyes on his, wanting him to see the honesty there. The truth in the words I’m saying. My hand shakes when I pull it away from his face.
Wolfe told me he wants me to fight for this, for us, but as I look at him, I realize he’s fighting, too. We both are.
He nods, takes a deep breath, and starts speaking.
I’m amazed at his honesty, how open he is about hating my coven and our way of life. It’s difficult to listen to, but I know that central belief is what informs everything else. He tells me it didn’t bother him to use me at first, but then he fell in love with me, and even though his intentions were cruel in the beginning, he never lied to me about his feelings.
He says that every look, every touch, every word was real. He tells me I surprised him, that my connection to high magic—that’s what it’s called—is unlike anything he’s ever seen. He tells me that I challenged him to look at the world a different way andto consider the strength in my kind of magic, in sacrificing so much to gain security.
I can tell he doesn’t believe it’s the right choice, that he would never give up that part of himself for any amount of luxury or protection. But he says meeting me forced him to look at our magic in a new light.
He talks about the currents and how irresponsible my mother is being, how my coven is willingly destroying the island. He says it will come back to harm us in irreparable ways if we don’t do something soon, and I nod along with his words because I know they’re true. I feel it every time I’m in the sea, and I wonder if this was something we bonded over. He tells me about the moonflowers and the lie I’ve been told my whole life, and I can’t help it when tears form in my eyes. It feels as if the wind has been knocked out of me, and I wonder how I will ever look at my mother the same way.
“The moonflowers,” I start, remembering the painting I saw with Landon. “I don’t understand. I saw a painting on the mainland that depicted witches being tortured with them; it was hundreds of years old. How far back does this lie go?”
Wolfe shakes his head. “If you’re thinking of Pruitt’s work, that’s not what the painting shows; it just happens to fit into the lie well. When the witches moved from the mainland to the island, it didn’t ease tensions the way they had hoped. The mainlanders became more and more aggressive, and it all culminated in a raid on the island during which they uprooted every single moonflower they could find. The painting you saw depicts the witches trying to save the flowers.”
“So the mainlanders know the truth about the flowers?”
“They used to,” Wolfe says. “But the new coven has been stunningly effective at rewriting history, and over the years, they too began to believe that moonflowers were poisonous.”
I stare out at the water, completely shocked. I think of the painting, and my eyes burn with the truth of what Wolfe has said. I don’t know what to say because nothing feels big enough, so I stay quiet.
Wolfe begins to speak again. I try to set my pain aside, try to fully hear each word he says because it matters. It matters to me so much.
His voice gets lower, rougher, when he tells me about kissing me. He says I kissed him first, and that when I did, he knew he’d give up anything, everything, if it meant being able to kiss me again. We kissed in the ocean, on the floor in his room, under the light of the moon. We offered up parts of ourselves we’d never offered anyone else, trading touches as if they were secrets.
He talks for a long time. He lets me see his anger and frustration and sadness, overwhelming me with his vulnerability. The way he speaks is guarded, and yet he shares everything with me.
I believe it all, every single word.
