His mouth had barely touched mine, however, when I heard him gasp. He jerked his head from mine and looked down.

His hand had touched his living body’s leg.

Something seemed to jolt through him, then. He flared more brightly for a second, his gaze on mine more intense than it had ever been in all the time I’d known him.

And then he was sucked down into his body, like smoke pulled into a fan.

And was gone.

Oh his body was still there. But the ghost of Jesse—the ghost I had loved—was gone. In his place was…

Nothing. I reached out, desperate to grab some small piece of him, but my hand clutched only air.

Jesse was gone. He was truly gone. He was back inside the body he’d left so long ago… the body that, even as I watched, shuddered all over as if to reject the soul that had just entered it….

Then went still as death.

I knew then what had happened. Jesse’s body had come forward through time, yes. But not his soul, because two of the same souls could not exist in the same dimension. Jesse’s body had been without a soul just as, for so many years, Jesse’s soul had been without a body.

Now the two were united at last….

But too late. And now I was going to lose them both.

I don’t know how long I must have stood there, holding Jesse’s hand, gazing down at him in utter despair. Long enough, I know, that Father Dominic came back, and said, “Don’t worry, Susannah, it’s all taken care of. Jesse will get the tests he needs.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I murmured, still holding his hand…his cold hand.

“Don’t give up hope, Susannah,” Father Dominic said. “Never give up hope.”

I let out a bitter laugh. “And why is that, Father D.?”

“Because it’s all we have, you know.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “You did what you did because you loved him, Susannah. You loved him enough to let him go. There’s no greater gift you could have given him.”

I shook my head, my vision still blurred with tears.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to go, Father Dominic.”

“What’s not, Susannah?” he asked gently.

“The saying. It’s supposed to be, If you love something, set it free. If it was meant to be, it will come back to you. Don’t you know? Haven’t you read it?”

When I looked up at Father Dominic to see what he thought of this, I saw that he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring down at Jesse on the bed. Father Dominic’s blue eyes, I noticed, were as tear-filled as my own.

“Susannah,” he said in a strangled voice. “Look.”

I looked. And as I moved my head, I felt the fingers of the hand I was holding suddenly tighten around mine.

Color that hadn’t been there a minute before had flooded Jesse’s face. His face was no longer the same color as the sheets. His skin was the same olive tone it had been when I’d first seen him, back in the O’Neils’ barn.

And that wasn’t all. His chest was rising and falling visibly now beneath the blanket that covered him. A pulse thrummed visibly in his neck.

And, as I stood there, staring down at him, his eyelids lifted…

…and I was falling, as hard as I did every time he looked at me, into the deep dark pools that were Jesse’s eyes…eyes that weren’t just seeing me, but knew me. Knew my soul.

He lifted the hand I wasn’t clutching, plucked aside the oxygen mask that had been covering his nose and mouth, and said just one word.

But it was a word that set my heart singing.

“Querida.”

Chapter

twenty-one

“Suze!”

I heard my mother’s voice calling from downstairs. “Suze!”

I was sitting at my dressing table, admiring my blowout. CeeCee and I had spent the afternoon getting our hair and nails done. CeeCee hadn’t needed a blow-out… her white-blonde hair is straight on its own. But she’d gotten an updo, then fretted all afternoon that it wouldn’t hold.

My blow-out, however, apparently had staying power, because my hair looked as dark and shimmery as it had when I’d stepped from the salon.

“Suze!” my mom called a third and final time.

I glanced at the clock. I’d made him wait nearly five minutes. That seemed long enough.

“Coming,” I yelled and grabbed my evening bag and the filmy white stole that went with my dress.

I went to my bedroom door and threw it open. Coming up the stairs as I was about to head down them was Jake, carrying a heavy backpack filled with books. From the library.

“Has hell frozen over?” I asked him as he went by me on his way to his room.

“Don’t start with me, I’ve got finals,” he growled. Then, just as he was to the door of his room, he turned and, with all apparent sincerity, said, “Nice dress,” and disappeared into the confines of his bachelor cave.

I couldn’t help smiling. It was the first compliment I’d ever managed to wring from Jake.

I started down the stairs, one hand lifting the hem of my gown. They were the exact same stairs, I realized, as the ones Mrs. O’Neil had chased me down about, oh, 150-something years ago. I wondered if, in my current ensemble, she’d have mistaken me for a hoochie mama. Somehow, I doubted it.

It’s nice, I thought, that we have stairs like this. Stairs a girl can really make an entrance on. I got to the last landing, the one that basically served as a stage for girls who were going to their first Winter Formal to pivot and show off their dress to the people waiting in the living room, and paused, preparing to do just that.

But it was no use. I saw that at once. My stepfather was running around with a spoon filled with something green, urging everyone he encountered to taste it, just taste it. My mom was trying to figure out how her new digital camera worked and not doing the world’s best job at it. My youngest stepbrother, David, was talking a mile a minute to my date about some new advances in aeronautics he’d seen on the Discovery Channel.

And Max, the family dog, had his nose buried in the front of my date’s tuxedo pants.

I guess it was a pretty typical familial scene, one that I’m sure occurs in millions of homes every night.

So why did tears spring to my eyes at the sight of it?

Oh, not at Andy and his spoon, or my mom and her camera, or David and his complete conviction that anyone wanted to hear the entire transcript of the show he’d watched.