Chapter 237

Celena's Perspective I was exhausted. My body felt like a collection of loosely connected parts, but my mind was painfully, unnervingly clear. We were two people now, a single unit, doing something we had to finish ourselves. I was so grateful to Jacob. The feeling was a heavy, precious weight settled in the softest part of my heart, welling up even before the love did. He had seen right through me. He'd seen the still-boiling, stubborn magma beneath the thin layer of ice I'd tried to freeze over. He had suggested this final search. For me. And for his own tangled knot of feelings about Brett—the guilt, the sense of unfinished duty. This was my last hope. Not the hopeless fantasy of bringing a laughing, hair-ruffling Brett home. The rational part of me, the part that had learned to view the world through a lens of icy clarity, had already pronounced a death sentence on that tiny possibility. My last hope was for an answer. A period. A clean goodbye.