Amelia's bank account thanked her immensely for the fact that Henry wasn't insistent upon them splurging on fancy dates all of the time. Instead, they spent several evenings over the next couple of weeks hanging out at each other's apartments and cooking dinner together, squeezing in a movie afterward if there was time. On the nights when one or both of them was utterly drained of energy after work and couldn't muster the willpower to drive anywhere else, they curled up on their respective beds or couches and talked over the phone instead.

This little routine that they fell into was peaceful, secure. It was a relief to not be worrying about boring her boyfriend if she was too exhausted to do much more than stare at her ceiling—the only thing she really needed to do was say her thoughts out loud to him instead of letting them burrow themselves only inside her head. Some nights, she'd simply lay there and silently listen to the oddly-soothing sound of him quietly typing on his keyboard while he finished up his school assignments.

But Amelia did feel as though it would be a bit of a shame not to do something fun for their first Halloween together. She hadn't come up with a costume, but after a little bit of poking around online for things to do around town, she discovered that there was a free screening of Beetlejuice in the park on Halloween night, which sounded like a much more pleasant date activity than staying home and handing out candy to small children (though she wasn't mean enough to forego it entirely—she'd just leave a bowl of it outside her door before she left and hope that the first round of trick-or-treaters didn't steal all of it).

She wondered aloud to him one night over Facetime if Liam might want to come with them, too. The better part of a month had somehow slipped by since the last time Amelia had seen him and she felt the strange compulsion to make sure that he wasn't getting too lonely even though he surely had plenty of other people he could hang out with. If she'd been in his shoes, she imagined she would feel isolated even in the middle of a crowd. Because wouldn't his friends feel like she did with Henry, completely worthless when it came to trying to wrap her head around everything he must have been feeling?

Henry agreed that inviting him sounded like a nice idea, though he reminded her not to be personally offended if he wasn't dying to be their third wheel.

Amelia nodded, gnawing on the inside of her lower lip. "If I were him, I guess I'd probably resent me."

"What for?"

"I just mean that he's already missing his girlfriend constantly, you know? And here we are, probably looking like we're rubbing our relationship in his face. Does that make us bad people?"

Henry thought on it for a moment. "I don't feel like we're rubbing it in, but I get what you're saying, yeah. I don't want to be that person who's constantly reminding him of what he's missing. But at the same time, I don't know that he ever stops thinking about it to begin with. Which sounds depressing as hell—and it is—but that's how life is going right now."

She suddenly wished that she was looking at him in person instead of through the phone screen. She wanted to lift her hand and brush it along the skin of his cheek, to try to wrap him up in her arms.

"Do you ever stop thinking about her?" she asked.

"Not really," he admitted, his voice smaller than it was a minute ago. "I think I'm almost scared to and I don't know if I could even if I wanted to. Everything reminds me of her. Even you, in a way. That probably sounds weird—I just wish she was around to meet you. You'd like each other."

Feeling herself tear up a little bit, Amelia almost turned away from him, but she forced herself not to.

"Someday," she murmured instead.

"I hope so." Henry mustered a small smile and quickly rubbed at his eyes. "I didn't mean to get all depressing. My point was just that I don't think we're going to make Liam, like, exceptionally miserable or anything. I probably should have just led by saying that I know he's happy for us—and I'd know if he was lying—but I'll invite him."

"Alright," she said softly. "If you're sure. You know him infinitely better than I do, so I'll trust your judgment on this one. Try to get some rest tonight, okay? I don't want to hear tomorrow that you were up all night doing homework."

"This degree isn't going to earn itself–"

"Henry, I'm serious–"

"Okay, okay," he grinned. "I'll sleep, I promise. Sweet dreams, Amelia."

"You, too."

On Halloween night, Amelia showed up to the park at 8:00 p.m. with a very large collection of blankets to make sure they all stayed warm. Fortunately, rain wasn't in the forecast, but the sky had been gloomy all day. It was now an inky shade of black, the pale disc of the moon only creeping out behind the cover of clouds every once in a while.

Henry, who'd arrived a few minutes prior to find a decent spot for them to lay down a blanket before it got too crowded, had texted her where he was as she pulled into the parking lot. She hadn't entirely thought through how she was going to carry the bundle of heavy blankets across the field and avoid dragging any them on the ground while still being able to see in front of herself, but she somehow made it to him (albeit very slowly) without tripping or running into anyone. She could hear the soft sound of him holding back laughter as she toddled over.

"Let me help," he suggested, grabbing the old quilt off the top of the stack for her.

"Thanks."

As soon as he spread it out on the ground, she promptly dropped the remainder of the blankets on top of it. The closest thing to festive clothing that Amelia had found in her closet was a black cardigan and pumpkin-patterned socks. She still thought she looked cute, but she couldn't stop herself from smiling as she sat down across from Henry—he'd acquired a sweater with little ghosts on it.

"Let me guess," she said, shifting towards him so that she could run her fingertips along the collar and feel the texture of the fabric. "You waited until today and found this in the clearance section. But it is adorable."

He sheepishly smiled at her. "You know me well. Guilty as charged."

She tilted her chin up to kiss him on the lips, her hand carefully roaming from his collarbone to rest on the back of his neck. It had only been a few days since she'd last seen him and yet she had missed this, the shape of him, the comfort of it.

But when she opened her eyes, now that she was seeing him up close, she realized that though he was gazing at her with all of his usual fondness, he looked really, really tired. She delicately trailed along the skin under his eyes with her thumb, her lips tugging downwards.

"Not sleeping?" she murmured.

Henry tried to shrug it off. "I'm okay. Insomnia isn't really a new thing for me, it comes and goes. I promise I'm not just staying up late to spite you."

Amelia could feel that her eyebrows had knitted together; she attempted to relax and not look so concerned. "You hadn't mentioned insomnia."

He took in a slow breath, nodding as he did. "Yeah, I hadn't. I suppose I have this impulse to shelter you from all the negative things you can't control. I know that's probably not what you want, I'm sorry."

Cautiously, she asked, "Are you trying to protect me, or do you just not want my sympathy?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "I guess both. I'm sorry."

She did feel a small compulsion to be irked with him, it was true. Wasn't transparency the key to good communication, to a good relationship? But as she recalled all of the issues that she had been concealing from him for the very same reasons—for not wanting his pity, for not wanting to cause him any more pain—she felt the flicker of anger seep out of her.

So she wound her arms around him instead, rested her cheek against his shoulder, and listened to the soft sound of his heart.

"You don't have to keep apologizing," she said quietly. "I just want you to be okay."

"I'm okay," he repeated, and they both knew it wasn't entirely true about either of them, but as long as it wasn't entirely untrue, they could learn to live with that.

"I won't mind if you want to nap on me during the movie."

"I might end up having to take you up on that offer."

She had time to press another kiss on his cheek before they were jolted out of their little bubble by the quiet buzzing of his phone; he glanced to check it.

"Liam's almost here. I think he's bringing Moosey, too."

Sure enough, it was only a moment later that she saw his silhouette in the near distance—and that of the golden retriever bounding towards them much faster than his owner was. Amelia started giggling as she was quickly assaulted by dog slobber.

"Hello, Moosey," she grinned behind her fingertips, not quite wanting to be French kissed by him as much as she adored him. "Aren't you a good boy?"

"Sorry!" Liam called, jogging over to get Moosey slightly more under control.

His wagging tail gleefully thump, thump, thumped against the ground as Liam managed to coax him into laying down, continually scratching behind his ears to keep him appeased.

"I'm glad you could make it," Amelia told him earnestly.

"Me, too."

And to her relief, he genuinely did seem to be in a pleasant enough mood about being dragged out of his cocoon on a weekend. He at least seemed more awake than Henry did, though they'd both acquired a permanent appearance of weariness to them that they'd simply grown better at concealing as the weeks went on. But he seemed healthy enough, his skin still lightly tanned even though the sun hadn't been showing itself very much these days, the stubble on his jaw still tamed down into nothing more than a five o'clock shadow. But it was hard to gauge if a person truly looked well or not when you'd never known them at their best.

She'd never gotten to know either of them at their best, and she didn't know if she ever would, and if she dwelled on that thought for too long it was going to make her want to cry, so she tore her eyes off of both of them and looked at the movie screen instead. A timer was counting down to the start of the film. They had two minutes to go.

Amelia had only seen Beetlejuice a couple of times, the most recent having been at least a few years ago, so her attention was quickly captured by the movie once it started. Henry seemed like he wanted to be paying more attention than he could while his fatigue was catching up to him. Eventually, he stretched out on his back and put his head in her lap. She instinctively started stroking the curls of his hair between her fingertips, watching his features gradually relax as she did.

"Please don't let me actually fall asleep on our date," he mumbled after a few minutes of this.

"I think they're selling apple cider over there if you want something to get up for," she whispered back. "But only if you want to. It's not going to bother me if you need to sleep."

Slowly, like a cat waking up from a long nap, he sat up, stretched his arms, and blinked. "I appreciate it, but I'm not going to be able to fall asleep later if I do now," he explained, stifling a yawn. "Where's the apple cider?"

She pointed to the other side of the field where the makeshift drink stand had been set up, and after grabbing his wallet and asking her and Liam if they both wanted some, Henry trudged off. Amelia stretched her arms behind her back—the power of suggestion was beginning to make her sleepy even though it was barely past 9 p.m.

Liam softly chuckled under his breath and she sheepishly smiled at him. "I'm sure we make for riveting company," she said. "Sorry."

"You're not bothering me," he assured her. "I mean, I didn't really assume we were going to talk much during the movie, anyway. I just figured it wouldn't hurt for me to get out somewhere regardless."

Amelia nodded, keeping her eyes on him whilst one of her hands drifted to scratch the top of Moosey's head. "How have you been? We haven't really talked since the whole Nat debacle–"

At that, he had to hold back a real laugh, his lips threatening to tilt up into a grin. "That's one word for it. I hope she was okay after that."

"She's okay," Amelia answered, but her voice wavered slightly at the end.

She couldn't tell him that Nat's emotional bond to him was very much still there, that seeing him in such an upset state had brought her to tears. Liam's eyebrows raised slightly; he'd caught her faltering.

So Amelia swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat and explained, "She still cares about you, that's all."

In the second that it took him to absorb that sentence, the time seemed to stand still. Amelia was holding her breath, nervous that he was going to misinterpret her, that it was going to bother him somehow. But instead, he just gave a curious little smile.

"I know," he said thoughtfully, his fingers fidgeting with a blade of grass next to the quilt they were sitting on. Amelia could have sighed with relief. "I still care about her, too. I don't think I ever assumed that she stopped, even if neither of us was thinking about it. She...she helped me through some really hard stuff in my life. I don't think she actually realized how much she was helping because I was so horrible at explaining any of my feelings to her. But a breakup was never going to be enough to make me forget that."

He said it all with an air of relative ease, but Amelia was watching him, searching through his expression like she was rifling through a set of messy drawers. And what she found was melancholy, the sort that took you in its embrace and refused to ever let you go. There was something older there, something else beyond this fresh heartbreak, a pain he must have suppressed before he'd ever even known the name Lily Myers. The dull throb of a something that didn't crash on you all at once like a wave but rather slowly gnawed at you over time without your realization until one day you were barely more than bones.

Quietly, Amelia confessed to him, "She's helped me through some really hard stuff, too."

She wasn't at all prepared to own up to how recently that'd been, but she knew before she spoke that Liam wasn't going to ask for elaboration. He didn't need to know more, just as she didn't need to know more about him.

What they knew was that Nat was someone they shared, someone that brought their wandering souls together. And that was enough.

"You asked how I was," Liam said. Here in the cloak of the night, his dark eyes were stygian, unreadable. "I think I keep waiting to feel like myself again. As if I'll be able to just wake up one day and somehow it'll have suddenly happened. I think it's because I'm scared of changing too much, of doing whatever moving on even means. And I don't know if I could make myself tell Henry this, but I think...I think I get more and more scared every day that she is going to come back and she's not going to like the people we became while she was gone. That she'll come back to me and I'm still going to lose her anyway."

Amelia wanted to say, she loves you, so much so that she very nearly let it slip off of her tongue. But what did she know? All she had was Henry's word, and she trusted it with her whole heart, but that likely wasn't enough for Liam right now. Not when the life he'd known had been torn out from under him.

It was either beautiful timing or horrible timing that Henry showed back up then, precariously attempting to grip three cups of cider with only his two hands. Amelia scampered to her feet to take one of them from him, unable to look back at Liam yet.

When the movie was over, she walked Henry back to his car, which he seemed to find slightly amusing, but if a man was allowed to walk a woman to her car then surely the opposite was also true. After her conversation with Liam, she was feeling overly protective of both of them, even though she knew it was frankly unnecessary. She was unable to shake the feeling off of herself regardless.

So she kissed Henry goodnight and made him promise that he'd drive safely, and he in turn made her promise that she'd text him once she made it home. She returned to her own car, plugging her phone into the charger because its battery was on the brink of dying and she didn't want him worrying if she couldn't text him.

She wasn't really in the mood to listen to music, but the silence would have been too eerie, so she put on the same Halloween playlist she'd listened to on the way over. She might as well enjoy it while there was still technically an hour of the holiday left.

She wouldn't know how she ended up missing the notifications from Henry, if her phone had silenced them or if she'd gotten so lost in thought that she simply didn't hear them. But when she pulled her car into an open space at her apartment building and glanced back down at the screen, she had three missed calls from him.

They'd only left each other but fifteen short minutes ago; her mind instantly assumed the worst. Her pulse sped up; her mouth dried. Frantically, her thumb jammed the call button to make sure that he was okay, that he hadn't gotten hurt–

"Oh, thank God," she breathed when it only took him a second to pick up, her voice sounding strangled.

But her heart lurched in her chest when she actually heard the sound of his voice, even more mangled than her own. "There's another letter."

"What?"

Henry was talking at the speed of light, and it took multiple attempts of her coaxing him into trying to breathe for her to get the story: he'd checked his mailbox when he was pulling his car back into the driveway; the letter was just like the last one. Clearly written by Lily's hand but not sounding like her at all, cautioning them to back off.

Only this time, she'd put Henry's address as both the sender and addressee.

Amelia simultaneously wanted to cry tears of relief that his panicked calling wasn't due to anything even worse and scream and scream and scream until her lungs were raw, until her voice abandoned her entirely. Because what was she supposed to tell him? What sort of explanation was she meant to conjure up as to why the hell not a single person who had any power to help them whatsoever was doing a damn thing–

An idea entered her head.

A terrible idea, an idea that made her stomach churn.

But it was an idea. And if it had even the slightest chance of working–

She'd do anything for him, and perhaps she should have been even more terrified by that fact than what she was about to do.

"Henry," she said as calmly as she could, swallowing down the acidic taste that was rising up her throat and into her mouth. "I might know someone who can help us. Just...just give me an hour, okay?"

"Amelia, what are you–"

"I'll call you back, I promise."

Before she could talk herself out of it, she ended the call. She took a breath. And then another. And she tried to convince herself that doing it this way would be safe enough because she wasn't going to be able to bring herself to do it otherwise.

Biting down on her lip, without allowing herself to think about it anymore, she put the car in reverse.

____________________

A/N:

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