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PROLOGUE

2021, New York City

Behind me, Salvatore’s apartment remained untouched, preserved in the cruel stillness of a life that had ended before the room could understand it. One side of the bed was still turned down. The sheets still held the faint impression of a body that would never warm them again. On the counter, the coffee pot sat clean and empty, waiting for hands that would never return to ordinary rituals.

Everything appeared frozen from the last moment he walked away, and somehow that made it worse. The apartment didn’t know Salvatore was dead. The walls didn’t know. The moonlight didn’t know.

Only I knew.

And that knowledge had hollowed me out until there was barely enough of me left to stand inside my own skin.

I couldn’t move further into the life he’d lived there. Couldn’t pretend it was only a bed and not a grave dressed in cotton. I couldn’t pretend the silence was temporary.

The thought came quietly, without drama or warning, as if some merciful part of me had stopped screaming and chosen surrender instead.

I can’t do this.

Not the grief. Not the emptiness. Not the endless procession of mornings waiting for me like punishments, each one demanding that I keep breathing in a world where he no longer did. I couldn’t endure the obscene persistence of ordinary things—the refrigerator humming, traffic sliding past the windows, someone laughing on the street below as if the sun had not set over the wrong universe. I couldn’t bear my own pulse. Every beat felt like betrayal.

The bathroom was ten steps away.

I knew because I’d counted them the previous evening, barefoot and trembling, one hand pressed to the wall as if plaster might keep me upright. I’d counted them again that morning. Again and again, every time I passed the doorway and saw the medicine cabinet with its neat rows of bottles—each cap clean and white, each label facing forward, each one offering a kind of clinical mercy grief had made me desperate enough to understand.

For sleep, he had said.

For anxiety.

For the moments when grief became too much to survive.

I wondered how many it would take.

I wondered if it would hurt. I wondered whether pain still mattered when every moment already felt unbearable. Maybe I would drift away quietly, becoming weightless, slipping beneath the surface of my own body until the apartment, the grief, and the terrible ache of being alive blurred into darkness. Maybe, if there was mercy anywhere in the universe, I would open my eyes wherever Salvatore had gone and find him waiting.

My feet moved before I had made a conscious decision.

Ten steps.

Nine.

Eight.

The bathroom tile was cold beneath my bare feet—so viciously real that it nearly startled me back into myself. The chill rose through my bones as my reflection waited in the mirror above the sink. Behind that reflection, hidden by glass and hinges, the medicine cabinet waited too.

Hollow eyes. Pale skin. Hair I hadn’t washed in days. Lips cracked from crying. Cheekbones too sharp. Grief had rewritten my face overnight into something older, thinner, ruined.

A ghost.

That was what I had become. Not a woman. Not a wife. Not even a widow yet, because widow was a word with shape and ceremony, and there was nothing ceremonial about this. I was a ghost haunting rooms I had never entered while Salvatore was alive, surrounded by pieces of a life I had known only through him, waiting for permission to disappear.

I opened the medicine cabinet.

The bottles stood in neat rows, labels forward, caps secured—little white soldiers lined up for inspection. Everything looked organized. Controlled. Decent. As though order could contain the chaos inside me. As though dosage instructions and pharmacy stickers could make death look less like surrender and more like relief.

My hand reached for the first bottle before I could stop it. My fingers closed around the cap.

Madigan.

I froze.