Chapter 2

A bright, syrupy voice cut through the wind.

"Draven! There you are."

I turned. Lenora Veyra was jogging toward us, and then her heel caught on a chunk of broken curb and she pitched forward.

Draven let go of me.

I didn't see it coming, so I didn't brace. The brick wall slammed into my shoulder and the back of my skull followed, and the headache that had been needling me detonated into something white and roaring.

Lenora landed against his chest and laughed, breathless, one hand flat over his heart. "You always catch me."

Then Draven remembered I existed. His head snapped toward me, and his face rearranged itself into concern. "Vesper, are you hurt? She's sick. If she opens a cut it won't clot, I had to — I'm sorry."

But I had already straightened up. I dusted the wall grit off my coat and said, "I'm fine."

Lenora slid her arm through his and said, into his shoulder, low and easy, "Took you long enough. I've been standing out here freezing while you signed papers."

Draven cleared his throat. He looked at me, and something guilty shifted behind his eyes, but his arm stayed exactly where it was. "It's done. We can focus on the wedding now."

Lenora's whole face lit up. She glanced at me sideways, sweet as poison. "Vesper, I've been with your brother five years. We're getting married. You have to come."

I smiled. "It's my brother's wedding. Of course I'll come."

She pressed closer to Draven, her smile widening. "Then you can be our photographer. I want you there for the kiss — right at the altar, don't miss it."

"Lenora." Draven's voice dropped. He held my eyes, searching them, and found nothing in them to hurt him — and that, strangely, seemed to bother him more than tears would have. "She doesn't need to be there."

I kept my face still.

Lenora's expression flickered. A flash of something ugly under the sweetness. And then she sagged into him, one hand clutching at her chest. "Draven. My heart — I can't get a full breath—"

His attention snapped to her completely. "Is it starting again? Hold on. I'll get you to the hospital."

Then his eyes came back to me. "Do you still know the way home? I can have someone drive you."

"I know the way," I said.

He hesitated. But whatever the clerk had promised him—that the serum only erases your true love, and the rest stays put—seemed to steady him. The tension left his shoulders. I loved him. He was leaning everything on that. "Go home, then. I'll take her in."

He lifted Lenora and carried her to the car.

From his arms, faint and theatrical, she said, "Draven. If I die now, at least I die being held by you where the whole world can see."

"Don't talk like that."

Through the glass, I watched him lean across to buckle her seatbelt. She caught his neck and pressed her mouth to his ear.

Something in my chest went cold and sharp and stayed that way.

The car pulled away. My phone rang in the same breath.

"Ms. Thorne? The Lumière Institute has your onboarding scheduled. We'll expect you in three days."

I hung up and went home.

The apartment was a shell.

We'd renovated it together. Back then, he stood right here in the empty room, holding a paint swatch in each hand, vowing to live out his days and die in this apartment. With me.

Now the tea set we'd designed was gone. The little brass objects we'd argued over in a Sunday market — gone. Anything that had ever touched him had been carried out. Someone had even dug up the planter boxes on the balcony and turned the soil over, like the flowers themselves were evidence.

I stood in the middle of my own stripped living room and laughed at the ceiling.

So thorough, Draven. Was any of this to spare me pain? Or were you just making sure that if I ever came back to myself, I wouldn't show up to ruin your wedding?

If you knew there's no counteragent — that I'm never coming back — would you still have done it?

I slid my wedding ring off my finger.

I wrote him a letter. Short. No accusations, no pleading. I put the ring inside the envelope with the letter, sealed it, and tucked it into the gap between the empty planters where the soil had been turned.

Then I locked the door on a house that no longer had anything of mine in it.