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His voice.

It wasn’t real. I knew it wasn’t real. Salvatore was dead, buried in a grave I hadn’t been allowed to visit, his body consigned to the earth while mine had been left behind to rot upright. The dead didn’t speak. They didn’t breathe your name into silent bathrooms. They didn’t return simply because grief had made you desperate enough to break every law of God and nature.

But I heard him anyway.

Madigan, baby. Look at me.

I closed my eyes, and there he was.

This time, he didn’t come as a memory.

Not as one of the broken fragments that ambushed me without warning—the curve of his mouth when he smiled, the rough warmth of his voice against my ear, the steady weight of his hand at the small of my back.

This was simply him.

Close enough that I could feel the shape of his absence behind me. Close enough that the empty mirror seemed wrong because his reflection was not there. Close enough that, impossible or not, I couldn’t deny him.

What are you doing?

“What does it look like?” My voice broke around the words, barely rising above a whisper.

It looks like you’re giving up.

“I am.”

The admission left me on a breath that sounded almost grateful. There was a terrible relief in saying it aloud, in letting the truth step out of the shadows and stand between us.

“I can’t do this without you. I can’t keep waking up. I can’t keep pretending there’s a version of my life where you’re gone and I’m still supposed to be here. I can’t.”

Henry.

The name struck like a physical blow, knocking the air from my lungs and sending pain through a place I had not realized could still feel anything.

Henry.

Our son.

The small, living piece of Salvatore the world had not taken from me yet.

“Don’t.” I shook my head hard enough to make the mirror blur. “Don’t you dare use him against me.”

I’m not using him. I’m reminding you. He needs you.

“He has Illyria. He has Maxim. He has⁠—”

He has a mother standing in a bathroom with a bottle of pills, thinking about leaving him the same way I did.

“That’s not fair.”

No, it’s not.

A pause followed, heavy with everything we would never get to say.

But it’s true.

I opened my eyes and stared at my hand.

The bottle was still there, caught between escape and consequence, my fingers trembling around the cap. It was such a small thing—plastic, paper, and pills. Such a small thing to hold an ending.