Barrow Fields If we never make it back to California, I want you to know I love you

She still carried Lestan with her in some ways. It had not, after all, been so long since she'd seen him. Held him. Kissed him. Reverie felt the weight of her grief more like a physical ailment than any emotion; you don't need me to live clawing down her throat and leaving it raw, the memory of anger at a fever pitch, that sinking wasting feeling of sitting alone with the realization that she would never be enough. She wore it like a wedding ring grown a few sizes too small over the years, worrying it when it ached, never looking at the hand she wore it on.
But if she was honest with herself, it was only that: a remnant, a relic of a love long since burned to ashes. He'd come back to her in the end. It had been too late; one hundred and twenty-eight days too late, and Reverie had realized then that she would never again love him the same way she had before she had gone into that cave. Love was a resilient thing, a creature of its own will, but some things could never be taken back.
Lying next to Blossom sometime in the early morning, before the mist had fully dissipated from along the coastline, Reverie told herself that it was time to let go. This marriage, this family; it was all she had ever wanted, but now Lestan was gone. Maybe that was for the best. And she couldn't live her life in betrayal, no more than she could bear the thought of spending it in suspension — always waiting, caught somewhere between dread and anticipation, half in love and half in fear. Maybe she deserved it for all that she'd done to him. But Reverie was, at her core, a selfish creature. She wanted more than this.
So she let it fall away; the hurt and the hope, the love and the fear, proverbial wedding ring spiraling down the drain in a flash of tarnished gold. She would always love him, always, even as she drew her last breath and faded back into the world of dreams.
But it was time to move on.