POV: Mara
I was still screaming inside my own head when my legs carried me around the corner.
Not the scream I'd let out in the street — that one was already gone, swallowed by the night. This one was quieter and bigger and it had no sound at all. It just lived behind my eyes and pressed against the back of my throat like something trying to get out.
She was alive.
I kept walking. My cheek still burned. My right hand — the one that had held the bottle — was trembling. I shoved it into my pocket so I wouldn't have to look at it.
My phone had rung four times in the last three minutes. My mother. My father. My mother again. Then a number I didn't recognize.
I didn't answer any of them.
Come home. We'll explain.
That text was still sitting on my screen like a small, polite grenade. Four words that confirmed what my stomach had already figured out — that this wasn't a shock to them. That my parents had seen this moment coming and had cleared their calendars for it.
I turned another corner and stopped walking.
I didn't know this street. I'd been moving without paying attention and now I was somewhere I didn't recognize, standing under a streetlight with a dead phone battery warning blinking at the top of my screen and the cold starting to work its way through my jacket.
Think, Mara.
I pressed my back against the wall behind me and breathed.
Okay. Facts. Just facts.
Lena had been declared dead five years ago. Car accident. Mountain road. The car went over the edge and the drop was so far and the water below so deep that they never recovered her body. The police closed the case after six weeks. We buried an empty casket.
I had nightmares about that road for two years.
And tonight Lena was in Seth's bed.
With the same face, the same scar, the same voice — saying my name like she had the right to, like five years of my grief was just a small inconvenience she was finally getting around to addressing.
And my parents wanted to explain.
Something cold moved through me that had nothing to do with the weather.
They didn't say we just found out. They didn't say we're in shock. They said we'll explain — which meant there was an explanation already prepared. Already rehearsed. Already waiting on a shelf somewhere for the day I finally walked into that bedroom and blew the whole thing open.
My phone buzzed one more time.
Seth.
I stared at his name.
Then I answered.
---
"Mara." His voice was careful now. The fury had been packed away and replaced with the tone he used in business meetings — measured, reasonable, already building a case. "Just listen to me—"
"How long," I said.
"What?"
"How long has she been alive."
Silence. Three seconds. Four.
"Mara, it's complicated—"
"How. Long. Seth."
Another silence. Longer this time. And in that silence I got my answer, because Seth had many talents but sitting with uncomfortable quiet was not one of them. When he finally exhaled, I could hear the calculation in it — how much to say, how much to keep, which version of the truth caused the least damage to him personally.
"Two years," he said.
The wall behind me was the only reason I stayed upright.
Two years.
Lena had been alive for at least two years. Seth had known for at least two years. And for two years he had watched me light a candle on her birthday. Had held me when the anniversary of the accident came around every November. Had said I'm so sorry, baby with his hands in my hair while I cried about a girl who was somewhere breathing and apparently available on weekends.
"You held me," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine. "At her grave. Last November. You held me and you knew."
"Mara—"
I hung up.
---
I don't know how long I stood there.
Long enough for the battery warning to disappear because the phone had simply died. Long enough for the cold to move from uncomfortable to painful. Long enough for something inside me to go very still — not the dangerous still from before, but the kind that comes after. The kind that feels like the moment after an earthquake when the ground has stopped moving but you haven't figured out yet what collapsed.
I started walking again. No destination. Just forward.
And that's when I saw the building.
My neighbor's building — Dominic Crane's building — rising up at the end of the block. I'd walked in a wide circle without realizing it. I was practically home.
I almost laughed. I had no home. My apartment was two blocks east but the lease was in Seth's name because he'd insisted and I'd trusted him because I was an absolute fool.
I had no home, a dead phone, and a sister who forgot to stay dead.
I walked toward the building anyway.
And then the door opened.
A man stepped out — tall, dark coat, phone to his ear — and walked straight into me.
The wine bottle I was still somehow carrying hit the pavement and shattered.
We both looked down at it.
Then he looked up at me.
And something happened in his expression — something quick and unreadable — as his eyes found the mark on my cheek.
He said nothing for a long moment.
Then he did something that made absolutely no sense.
He put his phone in his pocket.
And he went down on one knee.