Gwenaëlle might know herself, now, ten years tireder than the girl who’d never told Asher Hardie in so many words that she loved him, but he’s near to ten years gone and he had never been this old. In her mind’s eye she sees him as he was, but her mind knows—

she reaches to grip Stephen’s arm, blindly. When she hauled him into the house, she’d been looking at him through two eyes, this dream comfortably certain that she should have no reason not to have both of them; now, he comes to her blind side and it is blinded, gold where he expects to see it.

“None of this is real,” she repeats. The wretched undead summoned up by her own sleeping mind—

The thing that isn’t Asher reaches for her, and the man who was would probably be proud of the way she puts her fist through its rot-softened jaw.