She lay on the cold ground, or whatever passed for ground in the space between life and death. Her limbs felt impossibly heavy, as if the world itself were pressing down on her. Every breath—if it could still be called breathing—trembled out of her in thin, uneven threads.
A short distance away, through a haze that shimmered like heat, she saw the fire.
Her body—her body—lay surrounded by flames that crackled and climbed higher with each passing second. She tried to push herself up, even just a few inches, but her arms folded beneath her like they no longer belonged to her. She could only lift her head enough to see the faint, wavering outlines of two people standing at the fire's edge.
Her husband.
Her closest friend.
They were side by side, their silhouettes sharp against the glow. She wanted to call out their names, wanted to beg them to stop, wanted to understand why—but when she opened her mouth, only a thin breath escaped, too weak to turn into sound.
Her chest ached with a pressure worse than any pain she'd ever known—an ache made of betrayal, of fear, of a desperate hope that this was all some twisted mistake. Hot tears blurred her vision, though she didn't know how she still had tears to cry.
She tried again to move, to drag herself even an inch closer, but her fingers only scraped helplessly at the earth. Her strength was gone. Her voice was gone. All she had left was the crushing stillness of watching everything she had been, everything she thought she could trust, fall apart in front of her.
The fire roared higher.
And all she could do was watch—weak, broken, and silent—as the two people she loved most turned away from the flames without looking back