Page 16 of The Lost Husband

Or a hand.

A shape shifts beside a tree. Not a face—just a hint of one, and a shoulder. I strain to see more, craning my neck as far as it will reach.

Promise me you’ll live.

“Noah?” I breathe, leaning my body forward, fingers scraping the boulder. The shape is already gone, swallowed by the dark.

“Celina,” Avi grunts, her back still leaning against mine, and no longer upright. “Who are you talking to?”

I shake my head, still staring at the tree. At the bark where a hand might have been. Where the words that kept me alive came from.

Or where my mind put them.

“No one.”

“Don’t let your mind turn on you,” she says firmly. “I need you to stay here.”

“I—I know.”

“With me,” she adds.

* * *

The darkness splinters into threads of light between tree branches, but morning only brings a hazy fog and a heavy sogginess. I right myself against the boulder, feeling a sting along my palms. Dried blood. My stomach burns, but not from sickness, just hunger. Avi’s weight is heavier against my back than it was when we settled on this pile of broken branches.

“Are you awake?” I whisper.

She grumbles and presses her feet into frozen leaves, crackling the broken branches beneath us. Being still in the daylight is more dangerous than being still at night. My body is stiff, frozen, and sore from walking, but I manage to pull myself up, noting the world is not spinning around me as it has anyother time I’ve stood in the last week or so. I spot the potatoes I’d dropped, like breadcrumbs leading to the indented path. I collect them and drop them into my coat pockets this time, rather than trying to warm them against my body.

Others in blue-and-white stripes, and a coat if they’re lucky, stumble out of the woods as well. I don’t know how many of us there were last night when we stopped, but when I look around, I don’t see the woman I gave the potato to.

“Where’s that woman?” Avi asks, stepping up beside me.

“Did any of you see the woman who was sitting on the log last night? She’s missing,” I call out to the others.

No one responds. Most shrug their shoulders.

“We can’t worry about anyone who went off on their own. There’s no time for that,” a man says.

The rest stare at me, but their eyes don’t meet mine.

Avi straightens her shoulders and clears her throat. “If she went somewhere else, she didn’t intend to come back.” Her words aren’t unkind, just fact.

I move from one side of the path to the other, scanning the woods, searching for a hint of this woman. I can still see her hands, the way they shook when she scraped at the potato. The stone she used lies in front of the log.

We start moving behind the others, slower than needed, but faster than I can manage.

My eyes settle on a patch of grayish-green fabric mounded on a shallow snow pile. I step out of line from the others and reach down for the stiff fabric, tugging at it just hard enough that the snow falls to the sides, exposing a body in a German uniform. His face is as white as the snow.

Avi grabs me from behind, pulling me away. “Why would you touch him?”

I need to see his face.

I wriggle out of her grip and clamber to my knees, crawling toward the dead man, my heart burning from within.

That’s not the man who saved me.

Everyone must be staring at me as I inspect the German soldier, wondering what I’m doing. “He might have tools on him—something we could use.” My throat tightens, questioning my sanity.What am I doing?