Neither of us wants to go first.

We’ve had our no-questions-asked time to be close with each other, to hold each other, breathe with each other. We’ve eaten, taken care of our exhausted bodies, seen to the most urgent of the worried messages from our loved ones. Nothing is stopping us from talking, except for the heavy silence that hangs between us.

In our outstretched hands, the wildflower and the malachite cutting. Two tokens, two vestiges of everything that happened.

Aiden's eyes are lingering on them, drifting slowly back and forth between the flower and the soft green malachite leaves. I’m trying to catch his gaze with mine, and I know that he can tell. But he won't look up.

Since I can’t get Aiden to meet my eyes, I find myself closely observing the rest of him. Seeing little things that I didn’t notice earlier, in the happy blur of having him back.

The barely perceptible tension in his jaw. A slight stiffness to his body, even though he’s sitting in a relaxed position.

He glances up, very briefly, and suddenly I can see the darkness of a storm contained in his eyes. A deep-ocean maelstrom, while the surface is invitingly calm and smooth.

How did I miss this before? Aiden seemed - shaken, yeah, but mostly okay. He was making playful comments about the scruff on my face, even laughing a little. His hands were perfectly steady as he applied the bandage to my foot. All that, while this was going on inside?

His deep voice speaks in my memory. Something he said at the cave in Port Sitka.

I’ve had a lot of practice pretending to be calm around you, Keane.

He’s… unbelievably good at it. I don’t know how anyone can breathe so steadily when they’re actually gasping for air.

I gently take the malachite cutting from Aiden’s hand and set it aside. I place the wildflower next to it, then move closer to Aiden, so that my knee is against his leg. I take his hands, give them a squeeze.

His eyes finally meet mine, but he quickly glances away again.

"I'm sorry," he murmurs. "I just - I know that you're not gonna like hearing this."

A small, affectionate smile rises on my face as I realize that Aiden and I are worrying about the same thing.

"Well, you're not gonna like what I have to tell you, either," I answer slowly, "So... may as well just get it over with, right?"

I wait, with what I hope is an encouraging look on my face.

Aiden takes a deep breath.

“I… I’m still not sure what the fuck happened," he admits. "I was having such a hard time keeping the noise down. I just didn’t have the energy to do it. I was getting more and more worn out, the longer I stayed at City Hall, so it just kept getting louder. Until I was fully freaking out, but too tired to show any signs of it.”

Already, this is becoming hard for me to hear. But I need to.

“I made it back to my place,” Aiden continues, still pointedly avoiding my eyes. “But even before I left City Hall, I was starting to feel weird and fucked up. Like I couldn’t get a deep breath. I was super out of it, and confused, and I felt this, like…” He gestures to himself, his entire body. “Tightness. Claustrophobia. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like something had me trapped.”

Oh, god. My heart is already aching so badly. At least the low, steady rumble of Aiden's voice is comforting.

“I tried to get some sleep, but at some point during the night, I felt…” He hesitates, searching for the right words. “I felt something calling for me, and I had to go. It took me a while to figure out that it was my Tree. I didn’t know, because it’s never called me before.”

I listen silently while Aiden speaks, images forming in my head.

Aiden stumbling out of bed, pulling on his clothes. Going straight out through the door, walking in a direct line to the mountain. Too lost in his confusion to think to call me, to take anything with him, to summon the ghosts.

He says it was like sleepwalking, having a nightmare while he was awake. He wasn't directing his own actions, didn’t even know what he was doing. He only knew that he didn’t want to be doing it. Panicking, but with no way of stopping himself. All the while, the noise was running wild, completely uncontrolled, screaming in his head.

The only thing he knew for sure - the only thing he could understand through the chaos - was that his Tree was in danger. That he was in danger.

“There were times,” he says slowly, “When I forced together enough energy to sort of snap out of it for a minute. The first time it happened, I was already on my way up the mountain. I turned around and tried to go back. I wanted to go to you."

He stops, swallows. He hasn’t looked at me, not once this whole time.

I’m almost grateful for that. Aiden is much better at controlling his expression than I am, and the look on my face right now must be something else.

I can only sit there in rigid silence as Aiden keeps speaking.

He started going down the mountain, back the way he came. Trying to get to me, so I could help him. But the call overwhelmed him, and he ended up turning around, heading for the Tree. Seconds before he lost control of himself again, it struck him to summon one of the ghosts. He tried, and realized that he could no longer use his voice.

Eventually, he got control of himself again. Lost himself again. And the cycle repeated.

Fluctuating between the all-consuming trance and sudden moments of partial lucidity - torn between me and his Tree - Aiden staggered up and down the side of the mountain, making no progress in either direction, until he collapsed from exhaustion and passed out.

He woke up once, hearing my note rise to an extreme level of despair and distress. Presumably when I had my panic attack in his bed. He made one last attempt to get back to me, to go down the mountain.

"I really tried," he tells me, as if I would be mad that he didn't make it. "I mean - I was crawling on my hands and knees."

He didn't get too far, but thank god that he moved at all. It was enough to make the malachite plant shift its leaves, enough to make me hear its quiet song.

After that, Aiden was once again knocked unconscious by his exhaustion.

“I don’t know how long I was out, but it must have been a while,” he says, picking at his sleeve, still not looking at me. “The last thing I remember is just hoping that somehow you would find me. Then I woke up, and… there you were.”

I stare at him in silence for a long moment.

Aiden steals a glance at me. He sees the look on my face, and freezes, his eyes widening.

“Oh - no, Jamie, don’t - please don’t-” He takes my face in his hands and smooths his thumbs over my cheeks, blinking hard and fast. “Listen, if you start crying, I’m gonna start, too, just - honestly, I’m - I’m okay, it wasn’t that - wasn’t as bad as it sounds…”

I just look back at Aiden until he fades off, biting his lip.

His expression crumbles all at once. I let out a shuddering breath, and pull him into my arms.

Aiden sinks into me and burrows his face into my chest. I stroke a shaking hand through his hair, press my nose into the glossy chestnut softness of it, squeezing my eyes shut against the gathering tears.

“Aiden,” I whisper. “I’m so sorry that you went through that, I…”

I can barely speak.

Aiden abruptly sits back, swiping his sleeve beneath his nose.

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry! I'm so, so fucking sorry, Jamie.”

“What - it’s not your fault!” I protest, taken aback. “What are you even apologizing for?"

“For scaring you like that! I know that you were scared. Believe me, I could hear it.” Pain fills up Aiden’s eyes, his voice. “I was gone for like, twenty-four hours, without saying a word. You must have been freaking out.”

I had been partially focused on trying not to think about what must have been going through Aiden’s head when the blackness closed in on him. When he realized that he was succumbing to his exhaustion, alone, in the middle of the forest. Knowing that nobody had any idea where he was. Knowing that his Tree was in serious danger.

But this last thing that he said requires all of my attention.

I hesitate, then manage to scrape together a few words.

“Twenty-four hours,” I repeat. “Aiden - do you know what day it is today?”

He looks at me with puzzled eyes, clearly not sure where I’m going with this, and I realize that he has no idea how long he’s been gone.

Oh, no.

I put my face in my hands, hating that I have to break this news to him.

After a moment, I feel a soft, warm pressure on my knee. Aiden’s hand.

“Jamie?” he says quietly.

I lift my head, swallowing back the tightness in my throat.

“Um,” I say, my voice wobbling a little. “First of all, it’s very cute that you think I could grow that much facial hair in just twenty-four hours. That’s you, though. You can do that. Not me.”

“Well, more than twenty-four hours,” Aiden clarifies. “We slept for a really long time, probably all day and all night, right? And you didn’t shave the morning I left for City Hall, either.”

I shake my head at him, my lip pinched between my teeth. “Still, babe… no.”

Aiden's eyebrows furrow in confusion.

“What are you saying?” he asks slowly. “How - how long was I gone, Jamie?”

I take a deep breath, bracing myself for Aiden’s reaction to everything I’m about to tell him.

“Okay.” I take his hands into mine again. “I guess it’s my turn.”

Aiden waits, his gaze on my face. I open my mouth, close it again, and then cringe with my whole face.

“Do we like, have to go into it?” I blurt out. “Who even wants to have this kind of serious conversation, anyways? I can just tell you what was wrong with your Tree, we could really just leave it at that-”

“Jamie.”

“Honestly, man, your Tree being healthy, you being home safe, that’s all that matters! Why should we even-?”

“Jamie.”

“Are you still hungry, by the way? Because we could go get some more-”

Aiden takes me by my chin, looks into my eyes. “Jamie.”

I stop, struggling with myself, and give up. I have to tell him. I know that.

Slowly, haltingly, I begin to speak.

I don't go into details that I know would only make Aiden feel worse, won’t add anything to his understanding of what happened. Not omissions, just simplifications. Like - I do tell him that I had a meltdown when I thought that I wasn't going to find him. But he doesn’t need to know that I fully blacked out, and resurfaced with my inhaler in my hands.

And I definitely don’t feel the need to explain to him the depths of my panic and heartache. He probably already knows, anyways.

Even with these finer details left out, I paint Aiden a full, truthful picture, beginning with me getting worried about him during my shift at the shop.

Aiden listens in unbroken silence the entire time. I leave pauses in my story, opportunities for him to ask questions or say something. He doesn’t take them. He just sits there with his blue eyes fixed on my face, his expression completely blank.

When I get to the part where I made the decision to abandon my car and keep looking for him, Aiden finally blinks. He jerks his head back sharply, then stares at me like he doesn’t know whether or not to believe me.

But he knows that he should.

He closes his eyes for a long moment. I stop talking, but again, he says nothing.

His grip on my hand, though, suddenly gets very, very tight. He forgot himself, forgot that my hands are bruised and swollen. I bite back the little yelp of pain that rises in my throat, then give Aiden's thumb a light squeeze.

He realizes what he’s doing and quickly loosens his hold on me. For a second, I think that he’s going to say something. He doesn’t. He just looks at me, waiting for me to continue.

It’s incredibly difficult for me to push through to the end. I can tell that it’s seriously hurting Aiden to hear this. I hurry through the part about the Tree, cutting the vine. But he looks down at my hands and clearly understands why they’re injured.

I spend longer on how it felt to wake up in the wildflowers that Aiden drew from the ground, the warmth he drew from his Tree.

“You helped me so much, even in the state you were in,” I finish earnestly. “It's fucking amazing that you showed me how to get to the Guardian Tree, by the way. I had no idea you could do that. Did you even know that you could do that? I was super impressed. Still am.”

Aiden seems to realize that I’ve reached the end of my recounting. Very slowly, he lets go of my hands, breaks his gaze from my face, and turns to stare blankly at the wall directly ahead of him.

“Aiden,” I begin, then stop immediately.

It takes Aiden time to think things through, and I just gave him a lot to process. I’m desperate for him to say something, to respond in any way, but I force myself to keep quiet.

Aiden sits there like a statue, unseeing eyes on the wall, and doesn’t say a word.

I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing when to wait out a silence from Aiden and when to give him a gentle push. This time, I don’t know. The silence stretches on and on, unfilled. I keep thinking that I’m going to at least see an expression on his face - some expression, any expression - but there’s nothing.

I wait a long time, but there comes a point where I can’t sit still anymore.

I offer Aiden my hand. He finally moves, but not to take it. He just looks down, staring at the purple and black bruises left by my secateurs.

I quickly retract my hand, curl it up, and drop it into my lap.

“Hey,” I say softly. “Do you - do you need some air? You want to go for a walk? We could go to the river.”

Aiden thinks about that for a second, then nods, his expression still unchanged.

I get up, take his hands before he can look at mine, and give his fingers a gentle tug. Aiden gets to his feet, silently reaches for his jacket.

I pull on a spare pair of Converse, then follow Aiden down the stairs. We step out into the cold, blustering wind. Aiden takes a few deep breaths of the open air as we cross the street.

I lead the way to the silver rental. Aiden stops again, looking down at the unfamiliar car.

“Hey, it’s okay,” I say, pressing the unlock button on the keys. “Noah’s gonna get my car back, remember?”

Aiden doesn’t answer. He stands there with his hands stuffed into his pockets, then wordlessly opens the door and disappears into the car.

I take a second to steady myself out, one hand on the silver roof.

“It’s okay,” I say again. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

I don’t know who I’m talking to. Myself, Aiden, or both of us.

I slip into the driver’s seat, automatically try to stick the key in the ignition before I realize what I’m doing. I shake my head at myself, press the button to start the car, and pull us away from the curb, heading for the Ghost Office.

Aiden doesn’t look at me. Not once, the whole drive over. He stares straight ahead through the windshield, his gaze on the wind-tossed trees lining the street, the pale winter sunlight cascading down, the glittering frost on the windows of the shops, restaurants, and houses.

Seeing everything. Absorbing nothing.

He’s deep in his thoughts, and while I would give anything to know what he’s thinking, all I can do is wait.

When it comes to my Sugar Maple, a little patience goes a long way.