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“Do you love him?” she asks, watching me.
“Yes.” As soon as I say it, I know it’s the truth. My life has been full of deceit and lies lately, but in the middle of them all is the unwavering truth that I love Wolfe Hawthorne and would have given up everything to be with him.
Maybe I’m a fool, but I’m a fool who believed in something strongly enough to fight for it with everything I had. I scan the floor, looking for the necklace I threw off last night, but it’s gone.
“Your mom wants me to convince you to take a memory eraser,” Ivy says. “That’s why I’m here.”
I nod slowly. I’m not surprised, but it makes the ache in my chest scream, a sharp pain where Wolfe laid his head just last night.
“Do you think I should?”
Ivy looks down, and I can see how hard this is for her, how she’s warring with herself over what to say. She finally looks at meagain, and her eyes are sad. “Yes.” Her voice shakes. “You have a lot of big events coming up, huge decisions that impact not only you but all of us. Forgetting Wolfe will allow you to start your new life with a clean slate, with excitement and hope instead of regret and pain.” She pauses. “You turned your back on us, Tana. You turned your back on me. But that doesn’t have to be the end. You can still do what you need to do.”
“You really believe that?”
“Yes,” she says. “This is bigger than you. It always has been.”
I bring my knees to my chest. Maybe this is my chance at redemption, my chance to make up for all the mistakes I’ve made and put myself back on the right path. I can still turn this around and bring security and peace to my coven. I can still make this right.
“How does it work?” I ask, my voice quiet.
“We’d make you a tea using something of Wolfe’s,” she says, eyeing the black sweater hanging off the foot of my bed, the one I wore home last night. It still smells like him, like woodsmoke and salt, and I instinctively reach for it. “The tea will be very specific and target only memories including Wolfe and dark magic—everything else will remain intact. But it won’t be perfect. There is a risk your memories will come back at some point. We wouldn’t be erasing them so much as suppressing them; they won’t come back unbidden, but there are certain events that could trigger them.”
That means I would also forget about my mother’s lies, because each one is linked to something I learned from Wolfe. I don’t want to be okay with forgetting, to settle for ignorance, butI’ll have to if I decide to go through with this. There is no way to untangle my mother’s deceit from memories of Wolfe.
“I wouldn’t forget anything else? Nothing about you or my parents or the sea? Nothing about Landon?”
She shakes her head. “You’ll forget this conversation and any others we’ve had about Wolfe. If you think back on it after taking the memory eraser, it will feel foggy. You’ll remember I was here, but you won’t remember what we talked about.”
“Is this allowed within the new order?” I ask. “It sounds a lot like dark magic.”
“It’s a gray area,” Ivy admits, and I don’t miss the way she flinches at the wordsdark magic. “We’d never offer something like this in the shop, but given that it would be suppressing your memories instead of stripping them, the council granted us approval. The same effect could be produced with wine or spirits—this is just a more intense version. But that’s why it isn’t perfect, because it’s weak enough to fit within the rules.”
“But you would still remember all this. Is my mother okay with that?”
“I would never do anything to jeopardize our alliance with the mainland. She knows that.”
I suppose it should upset me that Ivy gets to remember things I have to forget, but she’s right—she would never do anything to put our coven at risk. She believes in this life more than anyone I know, and if my memories are safe with anyone, it’s her.
I breathe out, heavy and long. “How can this be right when the thought of it is devastating?”
I close my eyes and picture Wolfe in the moonlight, remember what it was like to use his magic and feel like myself for the first time in my life. I see him watching me with awe, kissing my skin, touching me as if I was the answer to every question he’d ever asked. I hear the anger in his voice when I don’t give myself enough credit, when I apologize for who I am. I taste the salt on his skin from when we clung to each other in the water, holding on as if we could each save the other’s life.
And that’s when I understand. I won’t make the right decision if I remember, if I hold on to these moments with everything I have. If I think for a single second that he might whisper my name at midnight—if I know he’s out there, practicing his magic and painting his portraits and doing whatever it takes to ensure the survival of his coven—I won’t make the right choice.
We are the same, he and I. We believe in our ways of life, we are loyal to the ones we love, and we would do anything to give them the safety and peace they deserve. And maybe there’s beauty in that, knowing we will each be fighting for these things in our own way, doing all that we can to hold on to what we care about most.
Apart, but together.
“Okay,” I finally say, looking at Ivy. “I’ll take it.”
“You’re doing the right thing.” She meets my eyes when she says it, but there’s no fire in her. Not like there used to be. Maybe I put it out when I saved her life with dark magic, or maybe she won’t let her guard down around me anymore.
“I’ll tell your mother. We should have it ready later today.”
She stands and walks to the door, then backtracks, grabbingWolfe’s sweater from me. She leaves, and the door slams shut behind her.
“Ivy, wait!” I yell, jumping from my bed and rushing out of the room. She’s halfway down the stairs when I pull the sweater from her and clutch it in my hands, bringing it to my face so I can smell him again. My tears soak into the fabric and leave tiny wet spots that will soon dry. Maybe they will end up in the memory eraser.
