He began to pull his hand away. I grabbed his wrist before he could complete the motion, holding it in place, and he smiled, a little unsteadily.

  “Always did know what you wanted,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Hi, Thomas,” I said, still holding his hand against my face. “Miss me?”

  “Oh, well, it’s not like I’m any stranger to being locked up while you go gallivanting, so I suppose I shouldn’t have, but I missed you when you went off to college, and I missed you when I went off to hell,” he said, shoulders dropping slightly as he started to relax. He didn’t try to pull his hand away from my face again. Instead, he reached up with his remaining hand and slid it around behind my neck, pulling me down toward him.

  Adrenaline is fun. It tries its best to keep us alive during a fight, and then when the fight is over, it does all sorts of clever things. Sometimes it exhausts us, or makes us hungry, or makes absolutely everything seem funny, no matter how inappropriate laughter is. It can bring relief, or it can bring crushing depression. Or it can bring the urge to be close to another person, to ground yourself in the act of touching and being touched.

  I’ve always fallen at least partially into the last camp, which has made the past fifty years even more fun. When getting into a big fight makes you want to be touched so badly it causes physical pain, and there’s no one around who you want touching you, you spend a lot of time feeling like your skin doesn’t fit quite right. As Thomas pulled me down to him, I had to swallow the urge to shout with relieved joy, and then he was kissing me, and there wasn’t room for much of anything else in my head.

  Fifty years apart, and he still remembered the way I liked to be kissed, and I still remembered how to kiss him back. I’d been a little worried about that. I finally let go of his hand in order to wind my fingers into his hair. I was still angry, but that only added fuel to the last fifty years of helpless, hopeless longing, and so for the moment, I just kissed him, and he kissed me back, and it was enough. Dear God, it was enough to pay for everything I’d lost and everything I’d given up and everything I’d left behind.

  At first, I didn’t even register the distant sound of shouting. It was happening somewhere else, and it wasn’t my problem. The door slamming open, that could become my problem, as could the footsteps that ran across the floor behind us, moving fast enough that the acoustics of the room didn’t have time to swallow them the way they’d been swallowing every other sound. They slowed as they got closer, and I should probably have been concerned about that, should probably have stopped kissing Thomas long enough to look, but honestly, I didn’t give a fuck. Let them stab me in the back, let this be where I died; at least I’d go knowing I’d been right all along. I hadn’t thrown my entire life away for nothing.

  “Boss?” said Sally, Mainer accent impossible to mistake for anything else.

  Thomas was underneath me, and the floor was underneath him. He couldn’t exactly pull away. What he could do was stop kissing me.

  I decided to hate Sally a little bit.

  “I’m fine, Sally,” he said, breath hot against my cheek. It was one more reminder that he was here and real and alive, not an illusion or a cruel trick. Some sorcerers can do a lot with illusions. I’ve yet to meet one who can make a mimic of a man believable enough to keep seeming real to a woman when she’s straddling him and they’re making out like a couple of horny teenagers behind the diner. There were too many physical tells and reactions for even the most elaborate spell to keep track of.

  “But she hit me,” protested Sally, sounding furious.

  Thomas sighed.

  I knew that sigh. It meant he needed to pay attention to a problem, and I needed to stop distracting him. I hated that sigh almost as much as I hated Sally. I pushed myself away from him, sitting up, but didn’t get off of him as I turned to glare over my shoulder at Sally and the four guards who had come with her.

  One of them was the guard I had originally taken the fauchard away from, presumably looking for a little redemption. I didn’t spare him from my disapproving expression. Couldn’t they see that we were too busy for them to come crashing in and breaking the mood?

  Also, now that I was no longer actively making out with my husband, my split lip was starting to ache, and I didn’t like it. Kissing was not going to resume until I’d had some time to patch myself up, and that was enough to make me even crankier.

  It showed in my face, too, because the guards looked even more uncomfortable. Beneath me, Thomas pushed himself up onto his elbows—not the most dignified position for an Autarch—and sighed again as I turned my attention back to him. “I’m sure she did,” he said. “Alice has always been prone to thinking with her fists when under pressure. I apologize for the lack of introductions. Sally Henderson, meet my wife, Alice Price.”

  “Alice Price-Healy,” I corrected smoothly. He flashed me a quick, semi-startled look. “I’ll explain later, sweetheart.”

  I didn’t start habitually hyphenating my last name until sometime in the eighties, when it became a common enough practice in America that I realized it was an option, and I discovered that some doors that slammed shut on the name “Price” would crack open, just a little, for the name “Healy.” I have pride. That didn’t mean I could afford to leave any tool unused during my search.

  “Quite,” he said, and returned his attention to Sally. “As I was saying, this is my wife. I’m sure she was unsettled to wake up disarmed and surrounded by strangers.” He shot another glance at me. “We still have a great many things to discuss, but now that we’ve established our bona fides, I’m sure she won’t be assaulting any more members of the household.”

  “Only if they make me,” I said. “Don’t start none, won’t be none.”

  “Even so.” He looked past me to Sally. “Does this address your concerns?”

  “Not in the least,” Sally said. “Your wife’s dead. You’ve always been very clear on that point. ‘She was the love of my life, but walls have more common sense than she did, and it’s been fifty years. Even if Mary was able to keep her from doing something stupid right away, she’ll have found plenty of opportunities to be stupid between then and now. I’m a widower, and it would be cruelty to try to tell myself otherwise.’”

  “It would seem I underestimated her resourcefulness,” said Thomas.

  “I’m a human cockroach,” I said blithely, and turned again, to see Sally glaring daggers at me.

  “Or she’s a trick intended to get you to lower your guard,” she said stiffly. “This . . . woman . . . looks young enough to have been in the grade below me at school. She’s not your wife.”

  “Yes, and we’re going to discuss her apparent age as soon as we get a moment to ourselves,” said Thomas. “I promise you, she has passed every test I’ve set before her, even the accidental ones, and I am convinced of her identity.”

  “I’m sorry I hit you,” I said. “I may have thought I had good reasons, but I could have tried to discuss things further before I resorted to violence.” Given that she’d been trying to convince me I’d never be able to get Thomas to believe that I was myself, I wasn’t sure there had been any other ending to our conversation, but I was trying to apologize, not make excuses.

  Sally scowled at me. “You’re making a mistake, sir,” she said. “This is a trick, and you’re going to regret it.”

  “If so, it’s my mistake to regret,” he said. “You may all go. Thank you for your concern. Please tell the others I would like to be undisturbed for the rest of the afternoon.”

  Sally looked like she wanted to argue. She didn’t. Instead, she took a long step back before turning on her heel and storming away, the guards following after her. The one whose fauchard I’d stolen paused to recover the abandoned voulge from the floor, then scurried after his companions, and in another minute, Thomas and I were alone again.

  “Alice . . .” he said, reaching up to grasp my hips and pull my attention back around to him. He looked up at me, expression filled with what looked like genuine regret. “You have to let me up now. I need to see you.”

  There was still a note of genuine awe in the way he said my name, and that alone kept me from arguing as I pushed myself away from him and rose, leaning to offer him a hand. He took it. and I pulled him to his feet.

  He looked me up and down as we both stood, not bothering to disguise the motion in the least. With me wearing nothing but a thin robe, it wasn’t like I had a lot he couldn’t see. He paused when he reached my left calf, asking, “Alice . . . where’s the scar from the Bidi-taurabo-haza?”

  “Oh, I got rid of that ages ago,” I said. The damage the Bidi-taurabo-haza’s venom had done despite the intercession of the crossroads had been severe enough to leave my left calf dented in and make long skirts a requirement for my job at the library. Hard to look like a demure lady who never causes trouble when something has so visibly taken a bite out of you.

  Thomas frowned, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “I need you to be completely honest with me now.”

  “I didn’t come all this way to lie to you.”

  “Did you find a way to make a bargain with the crossroads so you could come after me? I won’t be angry if you—no, that’s a lie, and if you’re not allowed to lie, neither am I. I will be absolutely furious if you made a bargain with the crossroads after promising me you wouldn’t, after seeing what it cost up close. But I’ll understand.” He looked briefly regretful. “I would have made another bargain after they took me if it had been the only way of getting back to you. I would have done virtually anything. But they never answered when I called. They never even let Mary come to see me.”

  “She wasn’t allowed to tell me you were still alive,” I said, stepping forward and taking his hands. Even being able to do that was a small thrill, and my hands remembered the shape of his so well that it was like finally remembering what shape I was supposed to be.

  Your partner shouldn’t complete you. Everyone is an entire person all on their own, and you don’t need someone else to make you whole. But sometimes you know what the world is supposed to be so absolutely that when it changes without your consent, the absence of the people you’ve chosen as your own can be a gaping wound. Holding onto Thomas’ hands, standing close enough that I could see him breathing, made me feel like that wound might finally have a chance to heal.

  That’s good. Some injuries are too dire to carry for long unless you want them to go septic. This one had started killing me a long time ago. Allowing it to heal wasn’t going to take the damage away, but it might stop it from getting any worse.

  “So how—”

  “The crossroads promised you they’d never let me make a deal, and they wanted me to suffer,” I said. “I got downstairs while the rift was still open, and Mary wouldn’t let me go through after you because it would have hurt the baby. They took you while I was pregnant, so they’d have a head start on hiding you someplace I couldn’t reach on my own. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I would have been right behind you.”

  “Then I’m so glad you were,” he said as he freed one hand from mine in order to cup my cheek again. “No one should have been here the way it was when I first arrived. This is a dead world.”

  “It’s a dead world in a dead dimension, technically,” I said. “That’s why it’s so hard to get in.”

  “I’m afraid that’s on me,” he said. “The nature of this reality is more connected to the reason that no one can get out. No one can manage it. Not even a Johrlac without the processing power of their entire hive mind behind them. Anyone who crosses the boundary is trapped in a world with no exits.” He glanced down, eyes going dark. “I tried. For so long, I tried. I beat myself bloody against the walls of this place, I did everything I knew how to do and some things I had to intuit on my own, and some things I probably shouldn’t have, and nothing changed a thing. I was trapped. We all are.” He looked alarmed. “You shouldn’t be here. You won’t be able to leave. The children—”

  “Are in their fifties now, and aren’t my biggest fans,” I said. “The grandkids will miss me. I’m sorry not to meet the great-grandkids. But our kids never met our grandparents, and they turned out okay.”

  “They did?” he asked, voice aching with need.

  I smiled, nodding. “They did. They both got to grow up and start families of their own. They keep colonies in their walls and put up with me bopping in and out whenever my travels take me back to Earth. The mice call Kevin the God of Decisions Made in Necessity, and they call Jane the Silent Priestess, and they’re happy, and they’re loved, and they lived.”

  “It was a girl?”

  “Yeah. She was a girl.” I smiled a little, wistfully. We’d both been hoping for a daughter, someone to keep Kevin company and give the mice a new priestess to focus their adulations on. The birth of a God was exciting. The birth of a Priestess was a week-long revel that had come close to breaking several windows and had almost been enough to break me out of my misery for a few moments. Not quite; I’d been sunk so deeply in despair at that point that if not for Laura and Mary practically holding me down, I would have been halfway to the crossroads before the baby was even dry.

  Jane and I never bonded, not the way Kevin and I had. She was born into a world with two missing parents, even if I was physically there for the first several weeks while I waited for my traitor body to recover enough to let me run. Laura had placed her in my arms, and she’d looked up at me with those big, dark eyes, and I’d felt nothing but resentment for the fact that she’d been the thing that kept me in Buckley when I needed to be going after Thomas.

  Was it right? No. Was it healthy? No. But we learn who to be by watching who our parents are, and for most of my life, my example had been my father, the man who never learned to love in a way that allowed for letting go. I couldn’t let go of Thomas. Kevin already adored Mary almost as much, if not more, than he loved me—he’d be fine. Loving Jane would have destroyed us both, and so I didn’t even try. I looked at that little girl and I saw a punishment, and I hated myself for doing it, yet I did it all the same.

  “She was beautiful,” I said. “She still is. She and Kevin live near each other in Portland, Oregon, with their families. The kids stayed together.”

  He smiled a little, grief in his eyes. “I’m glad to hear that. I’m sorry to hear they aren’t your biggest fans.”

  It wasn’t a question. It still felt like one. I shrugged, not meeting his eyes, and said, “They didn’t really know me when they were little. They mostly grew up with Laura and the Campbells. Kevin was apparently one of the best midway barkers they’ve ever had. The show still tries to lure them back when it passes through the Pacific Northwest.”

  “Alice . . .” His fingers fell away from my face. “Why did our children grow up with your mother’s carnival, and not with you? Where were you?”

  “I think you know where I was.”

  “I knew you’d have gone looking for me before you showed up here, but Alice . . . fifty years?”

  “The minute I was well enough to get out of bed after the baby was born,” I said. “In case they were still moving you farther away from me, I had to catch up. I had to reach you as fast as I could. And look—even with a start that early, they kept you away from me for fifty years. I wasn’t fast enough.”

  “Oh, Alice,” he sighed, and folded me into his arms, and held me. I didn’t resist. I just leaned into him, letting him hold me up and hold me to him in the same moment, and I couldn’t imagine a world where I would have wanted to pull away. If I could chase the man for fifty years, surely I could hold onto him for just as long?

  Eventually, however, he took a step back, tugging me along with him. I blinked. “You’re leaving?”

  “We’re going someplace where we can have slightly more privacy.” He shook his head, wryly amused. “And more furniture.”

  “Privacy works for me,” I said, although I really didn’t care that much about the furniture part. I pulled my hand out of his and took a few steps away. He watched me go, looking hurt and oddly calculating at the same time, like he was measuring my gait in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It made me uncomfortable, which wasn’t right—Thomas watching me walk should have been the sort of thing that made me want to swing my hips harder and make him laugh, not something that made me want to stand perfectly still until the watching stopped.

  “I’m just getting Mama’s gun,” I said, and stooped to retrieve the revolver from the floor, quickly popping the cylinder and verifying for myself that there were no more bullets inside. Sure, it had failed when Thomas tried to shoot me, but the first rule of gun safety is that no gun is unloaded unless you verify it for yourself. The second rule of gun safety is that it still isn’t unloaded, because invisible bullets can happen to the best of us.

  Maybe invisible bullets aren’t really a thing, but acting like they are prevents a lot of accidents.

  I snapped the cylinder shut and turned back to Thomas, smiling. “All good,” I said, then paused, slightly taken aback by the expression on his face. He was watching me with a look of such all-encompassing fondness that it was almost confusing. Nothing I’d done justified that face, at least not that I could see.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have realized you’d be worried about the gun.”

  “It was my mother’s.”

  “I know. I have the other one, if you want to put them back together.” He offered me his hand, almost hesitantly. “Will you come with me?”

  “I crossed a universe to find you,” I said, and slid my hand back into his. “I’ll go anywhere you want me to.”

  The narrow wooden door Thomas led me through had clearly been designed to blend in with the panels around it, virtually disappearing until you got close enough to see the seams. There weren’t even any hinges on this side of the door. I raised an eyebrow.