“My brother is dead.”

My words are deflated.

Sabine nods.

“I have his heart.”

“You do.”

Save me, and I’ll save you.

I’m supposed to save you, Calla.

The words chant in my head and the voice is Finn’s and the world tips and swirls.

I saved him so long ago, and now he saved me.

And now he’s gone forever.

My loss is profound and unexplainable and the void is enormous. A chasm that I don’t think I’ll ever come back from.

The heart that beats in my chest is not mine. It’s my brother’s. My dear, sweet, perfect brother. My Finn.

Good night, sweet Finn.

“I need to see Dare,” I tell Sabine, because she and I both know who she is, who she really is.

She shakes her head and she’s firm, and her eyes are vicious because her daughter is gone and never coming back, and Dare and I are both here instead.

Somethingsomethingsomething is off though, something is off and I look out the window and there is a peaceful pond, and benches, and someone is feeding the ducks. Someone who is wearing a hospital bracelet, just like mine.

“Where are we?” I ask Sabine and she smiles and it’s grotesque.

“Oakdale Sanitorium,” she grins.

No. A mental hospital?

That can’t be.

“But it is,” Sabine answers, and I don’t know if she read my thoughts or if I said them aloud.

“You’re disturbed, poor girl,” she says. “And so is Adair. Growing up the way you did, it’s no wonder. Your mother was with her own brother, Dare’s step-father molested him and abused him… obviously you’re both from bad blood.”

“We’re not crazy,” I shout, but I’m not sure and I struggle and she smiles. There’s a sharp pain in my arm and she leaves and everything goes beyond black to oblivion and I’m in a sleep so so deep that I can’t dream.

Days pass and finally, finally, Dare comes to see me, when he’s strong enough.

He’s paler, but he’s the same. His dark dark eyes penetrate me and he grasps my hand.

“We’re not crazy. We’ve fixed it before, we’ll fix it again,” he tells me. There’s promise in his voice but I’m so tired. “You have Finn’s heart, so he’s not really gone.”

“Is this even real?” I ask him, groggy from the medicine they pump into my veins. “Maybe we’ve been crazy all along.”

Dare smiles and his smile is real and it’s bright and it penetrates my fog.

“You don’t believe that.”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

“Believe in me,” he instructs, and I do.

Because Dare is mine and he lives free.

“I want to live free, too,” I tell him.

“And you will,” he promises.

Days pass with nurses coming in and out, to make sure I take my pills, the colorful pills that will keep my body from rejecting Finn’s heart. I’ll have to take them forever and their waxy residue gets stuck on my tongue. But I take them, because I have to keep Finn’s heart alive. It’s the only part of him I have left, and he’s my brother and I love him I love him I love him.

Oakdale and its grounds look so much like Whitley. The halls, the rooms, and one day, one gray day, I find Finn’s journal.

It’s hidden in one of my bags and I know it’s his because it says.

The Journal of Finn Price.

The end is the beginning, one of the pages says. I don’t know about that, but I know the middle was jumbled up and changed and changed and changed.

But it can all be changed back.

I have to believe that.

Destroy the ring, it says. You have to you have to you have to.

And I have to believe that I can save my brother in the end, because serva me, servabo te. Save me and I’ll save you, Finn.

Destroy the ring.

How does one go about destroying a ring?

Dare and I sneak away into the forest, and burn the journal before anyone can see, before anyone even realizes we’re gone. They can’t see his words, they can’t see our story.

If they do, we’ll never get out of here.

We’ll never be free.

And we have to.

We have to live free.

“I can’t live without Finn,” I tell Dare on the way back in.

He holds my hand and looks at me, and smiles a sad sad smile.

“I know.”

We walk and walk, and Dare turns to me.

“I love you more than life, and I’ve been doing some research. Salome married her brother, and she became a necromancer. She wanted to live forever, but Phillip didn’t. Phillip has been trying for centuries to end the curse, while Salome wants it to continue. They’ve been at odds, and that has been born into twins in your family for generations. That has to be it.”

I’m dubious, but intrigued.

“Are we related?” I ask, and it’s a question I’ve been afraid to ask, afraid to know the answer.

Dare stares at me with his black black eyes. “I don’t know. But you can undo anything. Perhaps the answer is not to destroy the ring, but to change things so that it was never created in the first place. If you can do that… you can prevent everything from happening. You won’t have to change it. Surely that will end the cycle.”

“But what if it ends us?” I ask and I’m afraid. “If I prevent events from happening, maybe we’ll never be born.”

Dare shakes his head. “I don’t believe that. I believe in Fate, and we’re fated, Calla. We’re fated. I feel it.”

“But I won’t remember,” I tell him. “When I change things and I wake up, I never remember. What if I forget you?”

“Then I’ll find you, Calla-Lily. I’ll always find you.”

Hope leaps into my heart and his eyes are so sincere, so true.

“Do you promise?” I ask, and he smiles at me, and I’m afraid to hope.

“I do,” Dare says as he puts the ring in his pocket. “We’ll get this sorted.”

“What a British thing to say,” I say.

“That’s the meanest thing you’ve said all day.”

As we laugh, I feel like we’ve been here before, in this time and place and with these same words. But I’m getting used to that feeling. Because by night we are free, and things change, because we change them, and déjà vu is real, and we’re stuck in it.

Because of that, we’ll change things again, because time is fluid and malleable and it never stays the same. We’ll save my brother. I feel it I feel it I feel in my bones, in my hollow reed bones.

“Nocte liber sum,” I whisper to Dare.

He nods. “Keep dreaming, Calla Lily. And one day, we’ll be free.”

I squeeze his hand because I know.

After lights out, after the nurses have made the last rounds and given us all our medicine, I sneak from my room and into Dare’s.

“You can do this,” Dare whispers into my hair. “Think back to the beginning. Imagine it, imagine what happened. Let Salome die without creating the ring, without creating the curse. Let Phillip be her uncle, not her brother. Let them die without re-living over and over. Keep your mother from being with her brother, keep us from being related. You can do it. You can.”

His words empower me, and I believe him. I can do it, and I imagine what he says and I snuggle into his chest because his arms are home, and I close my eyes, knowing that I’ll dream.

And when I dream, I change things.

I sleep

And sleep

And sleep.

And when I open my eyes, it’s a beautiful Oregon morning, and my brother wants to go to group therapy.

I stretch and yawn and grouse, but he’s right. We should go. I roll out of my bed, get dressed.

“Drive safe!” my father calls out needlessly when we leave. Because of the way my mom died, among twisted metal and smoking rubber, my father doesn’t even like to see us in a car, but he knows it’s a necessity of life.

Even still, he doesn’t want to watch it.

It’s ok. We all have little tricks we play on our minds to make life bearable.

I drop into the passenger seat of our car, the one my brother and I share, and stare at Finn.