“I’m sorry,” she whispered at last, and when he looked at her, his face softened a bit.
“Yona, I didn’t mean—” His voice caught and he stopped abruptly. She could see the storm in his eyes, the confusion, and she hated that she was the cause of it. Still, when he reached for her hand, she squeezed back, and when he pulled her to him, so that her head rested against his heart, she held him tightly. “I wish you had known them, too, Yona. I wish that life was different. That it had taken a different path. None of us should be freezing to death in the damned woods. People shouldn’t hate us in the name of God. But they do. And we are here. We are surviving. We are living to honor our dead.” His voice broke again. “We have to. Don’t we?”
She listened to his heartbeat before speaking. It was rapid and insistent, thudding against his rib cage like it was trying to break free. “I knew a nun once,” she whispered. “She told me that those of us who live good lives will be reunited in the afterlife. Do you believe that? That you will see Helena and Shifra again someday?”
He didn’t reply right away, and in the quiet, she could hear him sobbing again, could feel the tremors of grief that shook his body. “I do,” he said at last.
“Then maybe they are closer than you think, Zus.” She imagined the ghost of his wife watching them now in the forest, the way Jerusza sometimes watched her, and it was enough to make her pull away from him. Would the woman who’d loved him begrudge Yona for being here, in his arms? Would she hate Yona for taking a place she would never again be able to fill? “They are with you always,” she added after a moment. “As they should be.”
Zus sighed, but he didn’t step closer, didn’t take her back into his arms, and somehow, though she’d been the one to put distance between them, she was hurt by his inaction.
He looked away again, deep into the impenetrable dark of the forest. “I love you, Yona,” he said at last, not looking at her. “I love you, but that love breaks my heart. The further I step into this life with you, the more I leave my life with them behind.”
And then, without warning, he turned away and ran, his footfalls heavy on the dusting of snow, the woods closing around him before Yona could dislodge the lump in her throat. By the time she could speak past her shock and sadness, he had vanished, and with him, her newfound sense of belonging.
She wiped away tears she hadn’t known she was crying and then wrapped her arms more tightly around herself. The snow continued to drift down, and as she looked skyward, a few flakes landed on her cheeks, washing away the salty rivers.
Behind her, the camp slept, and the night was still. She couldn’t go back, not yet, and so she walked in the opposite direction from which Zus had fled.
Ahead of her lay a cluster of fallen trees, and she settled on one of the toppled trunks, studying the stump it had broken off from. It had been here for a while, from the looks of things, and over time, the sharp lines of the tree had softened. Now they were crusted in ice, hard and unforgiving, and Yona wondered if she’d been wrong when she told Zus that their broken edges were meant to fit together. Maybe the jagged pieces never fit anywhere again. Maybe they were destined to wear thin at the edges, and to freeze over, impenetrable and incompatible. Had she been fooling herself to think that she and Zus could fill each other’s empty spaces?
She lost track of time as she sat on the stump, staring up at the soft snow and the dark, moonlit sky, and the gentle canopy of branches above. Finally, she closed her eyes and sighed. She had to keep moving forward, and so did Zus. Their pasts would always be with them, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some sort of future ahead. Dawn was coming, the sky to the east just beginning to lighten as the stars continued to keep watch overhead in patient silence. She was just about to get up to return to camp—surely the group would be worried if they awoke and found both her and Zus gone—when she heard distinct footsteps to the west, crunching in the snow. She leapt to her feet, all her senses suddenly on alert as she stared into the dark, impenetrable depths of the forest, trying to see the source of the sound. It had been something large, as large as a man. Could it have been a bear? A large wolf? She hadn’t brought a gun, but she reached for the knife in her boot, the one that was always strapped against her ankle. She had just closed her hand on its hilt when a voice came from behind her.
“Yona?”
She spun again and saw Zus standing there, his eyes wide with concern. She stared at him, confused. Grief had thrown her senses off; she had thought the footfalls were coming from the opposite direction, but the sound must have echoed across the cluster of trees, confusing her trained ear. She blinked a few times to right herself, and Zus’s forehead creased.