Not all nights were dark.

While May was growing up, going to bed meant night, and night meant dark. Black. Skies dotted with stars, perhaps, through the thin cotton curtain window above her bed, but dark.

The full moon made the night bright—that was why it was for lovers.

And the spring mist of a balmy night, warm enough to melt the snow and fill the air with silver dampness—that made the night bright, too.

It wasn’t May’s first time walking out to the lake by Montrose at night. Maybe she was a fool. “Maybe, May,” she could practically hear Frank saying, his words whispered to the wind.

He liked saying that—“Maybe, May”—whenever she was being indecisive, and if there was one thing May always was, it was indecisive. “Maybe, May,” when she wondered if maybe she should bring tulips to the Easter lunch she’d been invited to since she hadn’t gone home for the holiday, or “Maybe, May,” when her brother wrote to her for money, again, and she wasn’t sure if she should send it, because how had he already blown through the last payment she’d sent? “Maybe, May,” Frank would also say with a slight grit to his teeth whenever she wondered if maybe he’d stop disappearing into the night in his fedora and long coat, meeting men she didn’t like and didn’t trust and coming back with money he said they’d use to buy a house together.

Sometimes, Frank felt like a decision waiting to be made, and May was too indecisive to make it.

Maybe if May had just decided…

“We’ll get married, I promise,” she’d told him the third time he asked. “I just want you to meet my mother first.”

“Then let’s get on a train,” Frank had growled into her throat, peppering her skin with the hints of kisses. “We’ll go for a weekend.”

But they never did. Because Maybe, May couldn’t decide if this was a good weekend to go or not, and then it was always too late.

Too late.

She’d come to this spot on the lake every full moon for the past three years, when the night was bright enough that she could see clearly through the darkness. She told herself it was because she and Frank always danced under the full moon, even before, but it sounded like a flimsy excuse. Frank was always easier to see on full moons.

It wasn’t a quiet night. Spring was arriving, which meant that the water along the lake was starting to move beneath the ice that had coated its surface during the winter, making a crunching sound. “It looks like quicksand,” Frank had told her a few years ago, his arm wrapped around her middle, his lips ghosting against her ear.

“How do you know what quicksand looks like?” she’d teased. “The farthest you’ve ever been from Chicago is Aurora.”

His eyes had flashed. Take me to Rapid City, then. But his lips had said, “I’ve been to Springfield, I’ll have you know,” his voice full of mock huffiness as his hand whispered across her abdomen, making her stomach clench with anticipation.

(“Don’t go doing something reckless!” she could practically hear Ma saying all the way from Rapid City. But Frank was always very careful with her. His hands were calloused, but his touch was soft, and when he made her sigh, it felt like the lake wind roaring through her hair.)

(May couldn’t make a decision easily. She tried not to be reckless. Recklessness was Frank’s business and sometimes Frank swept over her like the wind until she forgot how to breathe. She never regretted Frank’s recklessness when it made her gasp and sigh; she only regretted it the one time she wished she hadn’t said “Maybe,” and he’d have stayed home.)

Frank loved the lake. He said any true Chicagoan did, and he declared that she had the blood of a true Chicagoan running through her veins since she was always drawn to the water. There wasn’t water like this back in Rapid City—wider and wetter than anything she could find on the plains. The wind was damper, the breeze gentler when it was gentle, and the air just hummed differently because it echoed off the surface of the waves. On certain clear days in spring, you could stare across a saltless sea and see Michigan, an impossible distance away. The lake was magical, and all the more magical because of Frank, with his arms around her.

May tucked her coat tighter around herself since she couldn’t have Frank’s arms as the wind rustled her hair. She hadn’t done it too pretty today. She’d worn it in pin curls the night before the way she always did, but she hadn’t pinned it the way she usually did whenever she saw Frank. She wasn’t wearing jewelry either. Sure, she had a revolver in her purse, but she didn’t want to give ruffians any more reason to pursue her than just what lay between her legs.

(“Why do you go?” Annmarie had asked her insistently last spring, her face shining with sweat as she continued to work the dough on the kitchen table, as blunt as always. “Let it go, May. Find someone else.”)

I can’t not, she didn’t know how to say. Annmarie was of sturdy German stock, blond-haired and broad-shouldered. She was always so firm when she spoke to May. Years at the same boarding house had made them close in a way that most friends weren’t, but also close in a way that May never had been with her sister. Annmarie was a force to be reckoned with, and she would make May reckon whenever she put her revolver in her purse and tucked her coat tight around her. May always felt like a wisp on the wind standing next to her.

People always thought the wind was insubstantial. One second it was there, the next it was gone. Constantly flowing through the air, the way that water flows, except without the bounds of a shoreline. People who said that had never spent much time on the plains, as far as May could reckon. She’d seen winds so strong that even horses struggled to walk. The wind could roar like the tide. It wasn’t the rain that made storms howl and weep and cry—it was the wind.

The wind was a powerful thing, and it embraced her now as she made her way closer and closer to the water’s edge on this weird bright misty night. It held her like a lover, and that was how she knew that Frank had arrived.

“I’ve missed you,” he whispered.

His voice sounded the same way that it had three years before, that night at the jazz club with the secret door in the back where you could spike your ginger beer with whiskey. He’d held her in his arms, and told her he’d be back soon, and maybe, May should have told him to stay. She always thought she should after he’d gone, but especially that time. Stay, and we’ll go to Rapid City and tell Mama, and then we’ll get married by the lake, like we’ve always talked about.

“I’ve missed you,” she repeated, the way she always did. Her throat was thick, her heart was aching and burning both at once, as though it were both the hammer and the thing being hammered. Frank.

She’d met Frank less than a week after moving to Chicago. He’d stopped by the boarding house, a favor to his Ma, since it was his Ma’s friend that ran the place and there was trouble with the boiler. Frank had a way with boilers. He liked taking things apart and putting them back together. He did it with cars all the time. (He did it with her, too. He’d take her apart and put her together, and leave her weak with want for more.)

No one had ever looked at May the way Frank did, like she was a work of art. May wasn’t the pretty sister. She wasn’t the ugly one, either. She was just… there, most of the time. But Frank looked at her like she was something special, like she could do no wrong. Mama always looked at her like everything she ever did was wrong, but Frank always acted like everything she ever did was right. It was intoxicating—not that May had ever had a drink until Frank. He took her to speakeasies, and the way whiskey made her feel was Frank calling her his best girl and buying her a bracelet because it reminded him of her, or taking her for a long walk up the lake just because the sun was out.

The sun and Frank’s arm around her shoulder had kept her warm for days, but both were gone now. And even if there was beauty in the misty moonlit darkness, the memories couldn’t keep her warm.

They were starting to make her cold.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. Moonlight rippled silver off his hand as he lifted it to brush a tear away from her cheek. “That Mrs. Hubbard isn’t giving you trouble is she?”

His smile was warm, and sardonic. “You’ll say yes to anyone, just to keep them from getting mad at you,” he’d pointed out to her one night. He’d been angry about something. May couldn’t remember what. May always said yes to Mrs. Hubbard, even—or perhaps especially—when it caused her trouble.

“No,” May said. Say it, she told herself. Say it. It’s harder if you don’t.

How many times had she told herself that maybe if she didn’t, she’d get used to it. It would get better. Frank could keep putting her back together instead of tearing her apart, month after month.

He was there in the misty moonlight, straight-nosed and crooked-grinning the way he always did. His hair had that same smart wave to it that she always liked, sleek combed back to his head. She’d liked to run her hands through it in the few minutes after their hearts had slowed down, before they’d pick themselves out of bed and do their best to pretend to the world they hadn’t done anything at all.

“Annmarie?” he tried. “If it’s Annmarie, you should listen to her. She’s usually right about it.”

May closed her eyes.

On cold winter days in Chicago, the wind would rip through coats and hats and scarves, icy and brutal. One moment, you’d think it was just cold, and then the next, the air would tear its way from frozen lake to frozen plains, from frozen plains to frozen lake, as quickly as it could.

Frank’s words were like the winter wind, and her coat wasn’t long enough to protect her thighs from it.

Her legs began to shake.

I can’t, she thought. I can’t.

Why did this have to be the decision?

She looked up at him miserably. “I don’t want to listen to Annmarie,” she said quietly, sitting down on a large rock because her legs were shaking too much to hold herself up. Her hands were sweaty in her gloves and her skin felt clammy, though whether it was from her own sadness or the winter mist, she did not know.

“Then you should,” Frank said, peering down at her. There was concern in his face. She could see the moon through it. Was the moon concerned for her too?

“She thinks I should stop coming,” May whispered to him. “She thinks it’s time to let go, Frank. To move on.”

She’d wondered for three years if saying those words, or something like them, would break a spell. She wondered if he’d fade into the moonlight, wind, and mist, if he’d be as gone now as he had been when they’d lowered the pinewood box into the ground. More gone, she supposed. He’d left a memory behind for her.

You promised we would get married, she’d cried at the earth’s maw as it swallowed Frank whole. You promised me, once we told Mama, we’d start a life together.

It had felt like he was keeping that promise when she’d first seen him on a moonlit night, wandering along the lake by Montrose because that’s where they’d come together sometimes and it always made her think of him. She could capture memories of the light and warmth in the cold and dark, find comfort in them in a way she never could in the daylight anymore. But the months grew longer, or so it felt, and sometimes May only felt like she was alive on the full moon anymore.

And knowing Frank wouldn’t want that for her, couldn’t bear knowing that was how he left her, made her think maybe.

“And you don’t want to?” Frank frowned. Then why the tears? his brow seemed to ask.

“No,” she said quietly. You may now kiss the bride. “I do.”

There was no bang, no whimper. There was no mourning yell the way there had been when Johnny Toomey had shown up at the boarding house three years before to tell her that Frank was dead. There was just Frank, billowing a little in the wind, looking as stunned as May had always imagined he’d look when he’d been shot the first time. A slow I don’t understand that means you don’t have time to process that you’re in pain.

He didn’t say anything.

He just kept staring blankly at May, and the longer he did, the more she wished he’d yell, he’d cry, he’d do anything. One of the things she’d always loved about Frank was that you always knew where you stood with Frank. He was always clear about how he felt, what hurt him, what made him smile.

But he just kept staring at her, his expression lifeless on his bodiless face.

And what a beautiful face it was. What a beautiful, beautiful face, straight-nosed and full-lipped. She’d come to accept that his cheeks would never color the way they did before anymore, but when they had, years ago, they’d gotten all rosy like a garden. And his lips—oh his lips were the sweetest pink of all. Pink like a peach, and just as juicy when she kissed him.

“Please say something,” she whispered to him when she couldn’t bear the silence or the blankness anymore. Even the wind had abandoned her. The leafless trees around her didn’t bend their branches anymore. Even the waves lapped more silently than usual. “Please.”

His lips twisted into a wry, sad smile. “What is there to say?” he asked her. “What would you like me to say?”

“I don’t know,” May whispered. “Anything. That you don’t understand, that you hate me—”

“I could never hate you,” he said. “I won’t lie to you and say that I do, not when it’s the last time I’m going to see you.”

The last time…

The last time she’d seen Frank—really seen Frank, and not just the shade of him in the moonlight—it had been at his funeral. There had been an open casket. Whatever it was the North Side gangs had done to him had been below the neck, leaving his face relatively unmarred. She’d stared at it for hours, standing beside his mother who couldn’t stop crying. Why can’t I cry, she had wondered. I was going to marry him, why can’t I cry? She’d told herself then that it was a grief so deep that tears couldn’t capture it. That was why she’d felt so numb.

May rubbed her hand across her eyes. There was dampness there now where there hadn’t been then. Maybe it was the mist. Or maybe, May was crying because this time, when she said goodbye, Frank would say goodbye back.

Or maybe he was saying goodbye first.

This time, he didn’t make to brush her tears away. This time, when she looked at his face, she saw what his mother must have seen on her own face at his funeral: grief too deep for tears.

“I knew it wouldn’t last forever,” he whispered. “I knew at some point that you’d find someone you could see whenever you wanted, someone alive who could actually hold you and I’d just…” He sighed and looked away, out across the water.

“There isn’t anyone else,” she said. She needed him to understand that much, at least. But before she could continue, he cut her off.

“So much the worse.” This time, there was a bite to his tone. “You want there to be. Anyone would do, because anyone would be alive.”

“Not anyone,” she pleaded. “Frank—”

He sighed again and looked at her finally. His eyes softened, but somehow that made them look sadder. “No, not anyone,” he agreed. “You’re not that kind of girl.”

She didn’t know if it hurt more, knowing how well he knew her. That this had to stop, but she didn’t think anyone would ever love her the way Frank did.

He leveled his gaze at her fully now. “You can’t move on, but you can’t be with me. So you must move on. Is that it?”

“Yes.”

Maybe the trees said it; maybe the lake. Or maybe May, staring into Frank’s face, staring through Frank’s face to the city beyond, lights sending a muffled twinkling through the mist. Chicago would persist long after Frank had faded into the wind.

Tears ran down her face at that thought. The longer she looked at him, the tighter her throat closed up, like a clam clutching its pearl safe inside. Her throat locked every word she wanted to say but couldn’t bring herself to deep inside her, choking them off because if she couldn’t say them, then she didn’t have to think them either.

“Don’t cry for me,” he told her. His voice sounded strange. Not choked up, not froggy. It almost echoed, like the howl of the wind off the buildings downtown. His voice seemed to swirl and whirl around her like she was back on the plains, like he was far away and close all at once.

Because he was.

“I—” she began, but couldn’t keep going. The words were still locked.

“Don’t,” he repeated. “Not more than you already have.”

“What will you do if I do?” she asked.

“Regret this,” he replied as he continued to fade away before her eyes. “I fought death itself for you, but I won’t fight you. But if you cry, I’ll regret it.”

She wanted to sob. She wanted to sink to the ground, clutch at her heart to make sure it was still beating. She wanted to memorize every line of his face but his face was, increasingly, stars.

“I love you,” she said, rubbing the tears away from her eyes as she did. If he didn’t want her tears, then she wouldn’t cry. She could do that. She could.

He didn’t reply. He just gave her a sad smile before he dissolved into the mist.

May wrapped her arms around her middle, holding herself together as she turned away from the lake and began to make her way back towards the city. Behind her, the ice creaked on the lake like breaking bones, like her breaking heart as she walked through the mist and into the shadow.

She wondered if she imagined it, the words she heard whispered in the wind. They were so soft that she couldn’t tell if it was Frank’s voice. She couldn’t tell if it was something he’d say. “You’ll never love anyone as much as you love me.”

“I know,” she whispered back.