The first award show should have felt like triumph.
The dress was custom silk, liquid and luminous under the lights. The stage was cathedral-high. The room glittered with the kind of power that could bend cities. Cameras tracked her every breath like it was currency.
When they called her name—Anna Smith—the audience rose. The applause was thunder.
She smiled. She always did.
But when she stepped up to the mic, statue cool in her trembling hand, something inside her stuttered.
For a beat too long, the world blurred.
A memory—no, not a memory. A sensation.
Cold. Waves. A scream swallowed by wind. Blood warm against winter air.
Her fingers tightened around the metal until her knuckles whitened.
"Thank you," she said, perfectly poised. "For listening when I finally found my voice."
They loved her for that line.
They thought it was branding.
They didn't know it was the closest she'd ever come to telling the truth.
Backstage, flashes went off like lightning. Questions hit like hail.
"How does it feel to become an overnight icon?"
"What's next for Anna Smith?"
"Do you write from experience, or do you imagine pain that well?"
She smiled again. Soft. Controlled.
"Some emotions just… live in you," she said.
From the corner, Thomas watched every twitch of her face. He had learned to read the smallest cracks. He saw one now, a flicker in her eyes, the kind of faraway that wasn't stage fright. The kind that belonged to someone who had once lived inside a storm and hadn't fully left it.
He moved to her side, a steady hand at the small of her back. Just enough pressure to remind her: You're here. You're safe.
She exhaled. Found the ground again.
"Car's ready," he murmured.
On the way out, it happened.
A woman, older, excited, slipped past security holding a yellowed magazine clipping.
"Anna!" she called, voice shaking. "Anna, I'm sorry, this is going to sound insane, but… you look just like—"
Thomas stepped in, calm but firm.
"We're late. Please excuse us."
The woman faltered, but pushed the paper forward anyway. A photo. Grainy. A young girl. Wide eyes.
Jade Carter.
Anna glanced down. The floor tilted. The room stretched.
Her breath caught.
The smile on the girl's face, the one in the photograph, felt like a life she didn't recognize but almost wanted to.
Almost.
Thomas's hand tightened.
"Anna," he said, low, anchoring. "Car."
She let him guide her out.
In the SUV, city lights strobed against the windows.
Bryce was asleep at home, his little stuffed whale tucked under his arm. She always felt better thinking of him.
Tonight, even that didn't settle her.
"Who was she?" Anna asked softly, staring at the passing blur of billboards, one of them her own face, a hundred feet high.
"Who?" Thomas tried, but he knew.
"The girl in the photo."
Thomas swallowed. He had practiced honesty. He had practiced silence.
Silence had always won.
"A Canadian actress," he said evenly. "Disappeared years ago."
"Did she die?"
"They never found her," he said.
She turned to the window, watching her reflection stare back at her, a stranger with her voice.
"What was her name?"
Thomas hesitated. The truth was a door. Once opened, nothing would look the same.
"Jade," he said quietly. "Jade Carter."
Anna whispered the name once, barely audible.
It felt like a bruise pressed under the tongue.
Like an echo caught between ribs.
She didn't look at him again. Didn't ask more questions.
But Thomas knew he had not soothed anything.
He had sharpened it.
That night, long after Bryce was asleep and the house had gone still, Anna sat at the piano with nothing but moonlight on her hands.
She didn't know the song.
She didn't know the chords.
But her fingers did.
Minor. Major. Resolve. Break.
Halfway through, she stopped.
A name trembled on her lips, unspoken.
Down the dark hallway, Thomas leaned against the wall and listened. To the melody. To the fracture.
To the woman he loved being pulled by a tide he couldn't fight.
He closed his eyes.
He had saved her life.
But he didn't know if he could survive being the one who let her find out the rest of it.
Anna lay awake, staring at the ceiling.
Jade.
The name lingered like a song she almost knew the words to.
She turned to Bryce's baby monitor on the bedside table.
Listened to the soft rhythm of his breath.
He was hers.
Of that, she was sure.
Everything else?
A fog-shrouded cliff she didn't remember climbing.
Not yet.
But the wind was beginning to howl.