long time. It has to be at least a month by now.”
“Do you remember what day it was—the last day you were awake?”
He looks at me regretfully, his eyes cutting deep into my heart. He softly replies, “it was the worst day of my life. The day I walked away from you.”
I swallow hard and look down. “Charlie, that was five months ago. It’s October now.”
He turns away from me and leans against the trunk of a nearby tree. “Five months…” he says to himself. “It feels like it was last week.”
I stand frozen in place. My eyes drop to the ground. I’ve spent five months trying to move on with my life, trying to forget each and every moment of everything that happened between us. To him, it’s as if no time at all has passed. No gut wrenching summer spent locked in his bedroom staring mindlessly at a muted television, the curtains drawn tight and the bright summer sun begging to be let through.
He walks back over to me. “Emma, those things that I said to you, none of them were true. I was forced to say them. I never wanted to walk away from you. And now you’ve had to spend all of this time living with those words and no explanation.”
I cut him off. “Forced? Who would force you to do that to me?” I can’t hide the hurt in my voice.
“I didn’t know who you were the day I met you. I didn’t even know who you were the day before I had to walk away from you. Your father came to talk to my parents and me. He told us everything. I thought he was crazy at first, but there was so much that he knew. He knew I was a walker without me ever saying anything.
“He told me about Zoë’s family and how they were protecting your family. I guess they had put some sort of blocking spell on you to keep you away from me when we walked. He said that if you found out that I was a walker too, you wouldn’t fulfill your destiny that they had been planning and protecting for three hundred years.”
My heart sinks. “My dad told you to leave me?”
“Yes.”
I feel incredibly betrayed. “Did he tell you what to say when you did it?”
He swallows hard. “Yes.”
My stomach feels like it does a backflip. “Why would he do that? What’s the difference if we are together or apart?”
“He thought I would be too much of a distraction and that you wouldn't be able to end the darkness. But I realized that what I had done was wrong. I was lying in bed, agonizing over it and I made the decision to go to you and tell you the truth. You deserved to know the truth. But somehow, I fell asleep. And then I was here and there was nothing I could do to get out and get back to you.”
My mind is playing catch-up. How could my dad do this to me? Why would my dad do this to me? He watched me sit in the dark and cry for months, knowing full well how heartbroken I was over losing Charlie. He never once mentioned that Charlie was a walker, that Charlie was lost, or that he too was at the colony. He never bothered to explain what happened. He just left me there to break into a million tiny little pieces.
Charlie continues. “He told me something about a pendant and memories from other lifetimes that were on it. He said if you wore the pendant long enough, you would see what us being together would do to you—to me.”
“What? What would it do?”
“I don’t know. He kept talking about a curse and a promise he forced you to break that intensified the curse. He said that you and I had been together in six other lifetimes and each time something horrific happened to one of us. He told me how now was the time for you to break the curse and that you couldn’t do that if I was in your life distracting you from your destiny.”
I turn away from him. How would he know all these things if my dad hadn’t told him? I didn’t even know until just a few days ago.
“Emma, he told me to walk away, let you break the curse, and then let you find me again. He said he would explain everything to you when this was all over