I am increasingly concerned that Kasey may never return to Benton Street. She’s upset with me, I know that, and I have no way to explain myself to her. I’ve been reeling back and forth between wild elation over the fact that I made something move and all-consuming anxiety about what Kasey must think of me right now. I’ve finally found my way back to consciousness, but she hasn’t come to see me once.

I’m desperate for her to tell me what she’s thinking. Even if it’s bad news, it will be an answer, and an end to my agonizing.

I feel profound affection for all members of the little team trying to rescue me. Of course I do! I’ve been lost, drifting through the sea of time on a lifeboat, and here they are, striving to pull me up onto a ship. But I feel particularly attached to Kasey.

We ‘speak’ every night that we can. She’s the only other soul that Ketterbridge has ever claimed. We are two of two, for all I know.

Her sharp wit. The way she acts on her urges without question, like some indisputable inner voice is guiding her. The historical tales she narrates with such detail that I can practically envision them playing out before me, right here in town.

She tells me about Isaac Newton, who, as a postgraduate student forced by plague to stay indoors, picked up two toy prisms and changed the way we understand color. I see his face in the windows on Benton Street, furrowed with focus, stained by a rainbow of his own making.

She tells me about very old things, like long-lost tombs in Afghanistan filled with treasures from every ancient civilization along the Silk Road. She tells me about more recent history, like the Berlin Wall, and art forgers who tricked Nazi generals into spending huge sums of money on clever fakes. She’ll start telling me about one thing and end up all the way at another. We’ve had conversations that start with the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention and end with the unjust imprisonment of Pussy Riot.

I never know what she’s going to tell me about, but I do know right away when she’s thought of a tale she wants to share. There’s some switch that flips on, a complete and total reverence she has for the past. It sparks in her dark eyes, lights up her smile.

“Did you know that there are buildings from the first century A.D. that were designed with hydraulic piping to cool them down, Will?” she’ll say. “There’s a sunken nymphaeum that Emperor Claudius built…”

The world she tells me about is so much bigger than the one I’ve gotten to experience. I listen like a stranger from another planet, human history unfolding before me. All thanks to her.

She’s brilliant. Unpredictable. Funny. Wild. Sometimes a little shocking.

Even if she didn’t do any of that, even if she wasn’t any of that, I would still be drawn to her, as we share a highly unusual commonality. But she’s so much more than just another trapped soul. She’s deeply important to me, and I want her to know the truth about what happened to me. What I did, and why, and what came of it. How quickly the world struck back. Another piece of historical knowledge to add to that vast library in her mind.

I don’t know what to expect. Will she come back? Where has she been?

If she doesn’t return to Benton Street tonight, I could always return to City Hall and hope that I run into her there with Aiden again. Or I can go to the flower shop and see if she ever visits Jamie at work. I’ve certainly considered it, but the prospect doesn’t sit well with me. She knows where to find me. If she’s not here, it’s because she doesn’t want to see me. It’s unfair, then, for me to just start following her around like a shadow she can’t shake off. What sort of a man does that to a woman he claims to care about?

So, alas. Here I sit on Benton Street, a sense of hopelessness crawling deeper into my heart the longer I wait.

The sun is rising. Another night without her. Or no - it’s too early for that, yet. I turn to the orange glow caught by my peripheral vision and freeze. It’s not the sun, it’s Kasey. That unstoppable riot of color that always floats around her like a full-body halo. It’s her. She’s here.

I vault to my feet so quickly that I almost tumble over. I race towards the light until I can make her out in the center of it, then skid to a stop before her, staring, my mouth dropped open.

Here she is, just like always, except - well, except that she has all of the buttons on her blue top undone, the two sides of it left open against her stomach. A lacy black sort of bralette thing underneath. No shoes, no pants, just underwear, black to match her other undergarment. There’s a tiny red bow on the front.

I swivel around and put my back to her, flinging my hands up over my eyes for good measure. I’ve started thinking of her as Kasey, the name everyone calls her by, but some ancient reflex sends me flying back to formality.

“Miss Lavoe! What - what-?”

She’s just sitting in the middle of the street, in her own personal pool of warm light, her legs stretched out in front of her, leaning back on her hands. As if this is all perfectly casual. Does she not realize that I’m here, that I can see her? I must let her know.

The watch isn’t available at the moment, and it’s the only thing that I’ve been able to physically move. If I share my warmth with her, I’ll disappear - perhaps for the best, in this situation, but after days of waiting, I’m not ready to leave her again just yet. I stand there struggling for a moment, not sure what to do. I suddenly feel fidgety, flighty, my stomach where my throat should be, hands unable to hold still.

Maybe - maybe there’s a way that I can transfer just enough heat to make her aware that I’m here, without disappearing. If I move quickly. If I just brush my hand over hers and let it go at once.

So it is that Kasey Lavoe has me trying to walk backwards down the middle of the street at night, attempting to locate her hand without turning around to look at her. But it’s impossible. We can’t even physically touch, so how can I know from feeling alone whether I’ve got her hand in mine?

I spin around as swiftly as I can, instructing myself to look at her hands and nothing else, but my body doesn’t seem to be listening to me. I find myself with another complete eyeful before I dive for her hand. I grab her fingers, try to send her the warmth, and let her go immediately.

I can't see if it worked, because I've already got my hands back over my eyes.

“Will?” she murmurs. “Was that you?”

To hear my name from her, spoken without anger, is a blessed relief beyond speaking.

“Yes!” I answer. “Yes, I’m here, so might you - where are your-?”

“You’re probably wondering why I’m in my underwear, huh?”

“Very much so!”

“I’m bored of wearing the same fucking outfit every day.”

“Well - that’s-”

“And I wanted you to be excited about what’s coming for you, when you’re corporeal,” she says.

Heaven help me.

I spare a peek through my fingers and find a rather cheeky little smirk on her face. What is happening to me? Half of me wants to take off running down the street, while the other half wants to move the rest of my fingers out of the way.

As a ghost, I don’t have to breathe - it’s automatic, more than anything, a movement too hardwired into my body to stop from a simple lack of need. But right now, I feel like I actually can’t.

“Only,” Kasey says, adjusting her undone top, “If you turn out to be a good man, and you have a solid explanation for why the hell you got mixed up in Richard Newman’s business. Aiden says that you deserve a chance to tell me your side of things, and I’ve decided that he’s right.”

I wish I could shake Aiden's hand. I shall have to remember to thank him profusely if there ever comes a time that he can hear me.

“This is rather too much for me,” I tell Kasey, through my fingers. “I’m - I’m not sure quite what to do with myself.”

“Maybe I’ll come back naked tomorrow,” she says, grinning.

“Please do not!” The nervous flare in my stomach leaps wildly at the mere suggestion, and seriously, what is this feeling? If I’ve experienced it before, it was far too long ago for me to remember. It’s like I’m slipping and sliding down a cliff, with no way to stop myself. “Are you trying to kill me all over again, Miss Lavoe? Now that I finally have something to stick around for?”

“You know what I was wondering?” Kasey asks, regrettably deaf to my words. “What does your underwear look like, Will? Or do you still call them small clothes, like in the old days?”

“I - well - this is highly - I don’t-!”

“Like, are they basically their own pair of pants?”

“I don’t remember what I... I haven’t seen my own clothes for a very long time.”

“I bet you have a mustache, too. That would have been fashionable, in your day.”

I actually did have an excellent mustache, in my lifetime. Shorn away the night before my death, to help disguise my identity during the ill-fated raid organized by Richard Newman.

“Do you want me to have one?” I ask, running a hand over my bare upper lip automatically. I realize a split second too late that in drawing my hand away from my eye, I’ve given myself yet another glimpse of her, sitting there in her smalls. I whip around and put my back to her, then sit down on the pavement. A car makes its meandering way up the street and passes through us.

“Were you here the other night?” Kasey asks, as I take myself through several breathing exercises, trying to get whatever’s thrashing around in my chest under control. “I came to see if you wanted to go on a mission with me, but I didn’t feel any warmth.”

“I was still lost. Moving the watch was - did you say a mission?”

“I’m sorry that I was gone for a bit. Do you want to know where I was?”

“Desperately.”

“I was doing a stakeout at a dealer’s house, waiting for him to open his safe so that I could give the code to Aiden, so that he could steal everything from the safe and negotiate a bit of a - I guess you could call it a hostage release?”

“What?” She’s always finding ways to leave me speechless. I haven’t the slightest notion of what to respond to that, though she couldn’t hear me, regardless. “Your afterlife has already been far more eventful than mine.”

As if she knows exactly what I said, she lets out a little, sparkling laugh.

“I hope you can keep up with me, when they make you real. I’m a handful, according to Jamie.” She scoffs. “As if he isn’t, too.”

“I’m not sure I can keep up with you, in truth.”

“But if you were on the beat crew,” she continues, “Maybe you can. No one signs up to jump from log to log on a raging river with no safety net if they don’t have at least a little taste for adventure.”

An old memory stirs in me: the heart-pounding thrill of the leap, the moment of chance before your boots can find purchase. The shouts of the other beat crew men, the rush of the water, stinging and cold and eager to swallow you up if you make just one wrong move.

I’ve lost some of that - the wildness, the reckless bravery that had driven me during my lifetime. After all, it did end up getting me killed. But, so far as I know, I can’t be killed again. I spare one quick glance over my shoulder, just at her face. That dangerous smile is still there, challenging me.

I turn around slowly to face her, even though it feels like the most scandalous thing in the world. It's a new age, I tell myself. Surely I can control my own heart. Trying to kill me, though it may be. Trying to tear itself from me and lay itself down at her feet.

Somehow I know that I would follow Kasey anywhere, if she’d let me. She lights this fire in me, makes me remember the man I once was, who thought he was invincible, who leapt at risk like it was salvation, who walked out of his father’s house with nothing but a pocket watch, ready to face down the entire world.

Whatever adventure she wants, I will find a way to give her. I would leap from buildings and join her on stakeouts and swim across the ocean to visit these faraway places she tells me about. Or perhaps we could walk across the ocean floor? We don’t need oxygen, and we have nothing but time on our hands. Not that we can leave Ketterbridge, I suppose.

Or maybe we can.

I have a feeling that with Kasey by my side, I could do anything.