Chapter 1

Draven Hale had always loved me like drowning — total, breathless, nothing held back.

But the day Lenora Veyra's oncologist stamped terminal across her diagnostic dossier, that devotion changed direction.

He reached into his coat pocket and pressed a capsule into my palm.

A targeted memory-suppressant serum.

"Three days, Vesper," he said. "Lenora's dying. Let me give her a wedding. That's all she wants."

It wouldn't hurt, he promised.

Afterwards I'd take the counteragent, the last three days would dissolve like smoke, and we'd walk back into the registry office and put the ring back where it belonged.

I stared at him in silence, and I swallowed the capsule dry.

What Draven didn't know was that the compound was mine — I'd built it. And I knew that there was no counteragent.

In seventy-two hours, he'd be nothing to me but a stranger with a familiar face.

...

We came down the steps of the civil-marriage registry office.

Draven checked his watch. "Two minutes," he said, almost to himself.

Then, louder: "In two minutes it starts. You'll lose every memory of loving me. When it's over and you take the reversal, these days won't exist for you. No grief. Nothing to carry."

He turned and caught my chin between two fingers. "This is a piece of paper, Vesper. Nothing more. When it's done, we go back. You're the only wife I've ever had."

I looked at him for a long moment and said nothing. There was no going back.

I knew exactly how the serum behaved — not a switch, a slow unspooling. It took the memories one thread at a time, and the last thing it took was always the love. Sometimes it took weeks. Sometimes it never finished, and the person was left hollow with a hole shaped like someone they couldn't name.

"Are you sure you won't regret this?" I asked.

He laughed — that soft, indulgent laugh he saved for me — and ran his fingers through my hair. "Lenora's loved me since we were kids. Her one wish is a wedding. I couldn't say no to a dying woman."

He continued, "And you — you've never been the jealous kind. When this is finished, we pick up exactly where we left off."

I felt my mouth curve. I let the acid rise from my chest to my throat and said nothing at all.

During the most passionate year of our relationship, I drank myself into a bleeding ulcer to save a data package he'd staked his career on. He sat up four nights straight pulling my research back out of a corporate shredder and put himself into atrial fibrillation doing it.

I used to lie against his chest and tease him — "If my mind goes when I get old, what will you do?"

And he'd go still, and then he'd kiss me like he was trying to bruise the words out of my mouth. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare, Vesper. I'd lose my mind."

Now, the love of his youth was dying of cancer, and his solution was to legally discard me and chemically alter my brain. He wanted three clean days. A groom with no wife in the shadows, no guilt, no divided heart. Three days of undiluted love, and then a phone call telling me it was safe to come home.

So why the remarriage? Why dress the betrayal up as a temporary loan?

I laughed, and the sound came out wrong.

Then white light cracked through my skull.

My knees went. The sidewalk tilted, and I felt myself pitch forward — and then his arms were around me, hard and fast, his face entirely undone. "Hey. Hey. Where does it hurt?" He was already digging in his inner pocket. "If you're scared I won't come back — take them. Take the papers. Hold onto them."

I forced myself upright against his chest and looked at him with genuine confusion.

"What papers?"

Draven went very still.

"Vesper." His voice lowered. "You were divorced today. Do you remember that?"

"Divorced?"

And there it was — a flicker crossing his eyes so fast I'd have missed it if I hadn't spent years learning his face. Relief. Not horror. Relief.

I looked down at the manila envelope crushed in my fist, and understood. It had started. And the first thing the serum had reached for, before the love, before the years, was the memory of being thrown away.

Draven peeled the envelope out of my grip with a practiced gentleness, angling it away from my eyes.

"Nothing. It's nothing." He smoothed my hair back, and his voice went soft and strange. "You've been sick. Your memory's unreliable right now. I'm your brother. I'll keep these for you."

I stared up into those evasive eyes I'd once trusted with everything I had.

Fine. If he wanted to perform, I'd sit in the front row and watch.