Chapter 1

The woman in red had been with me since I was born. She was standing beside my husband when he kissed someone else.

Nathan had one hand on Celia Mercer's waist. His friends watched from the leather couches, waiting to see how far he'd go. He didn't disappoint them.

“Anna wouldn't know what to do in a place like this,” he said. “All she does is sit around meditating. Seven years of that. You have no idea.”

Celia laughed against his mouth.

I stood outside the private lounge with the keys he'd asked me to bring. The door was open just far enough for me to see the sapphire-blue lining of his jacket. I'd picked it out for him.

Beside his shoulder, the dead woman turned her head toward me.

Well? her expression said. Was he worth it?

Her name was Mara. My father had told her he was single. By the time she learned about my mother and me, she'd given him her savings and believed his promise to marry her. When he abandoned her, she jumped from a building in a red dress.

She came back angry enough to kill both my parents.

I wasn't going to pretend that what he'd done excused what she'd done to my mother. But a baby couldn't untangle any of that. I could only cry while something cold leaned over my crib.

Elias Rowan took me to the sanctuary above Briar Glen before she could finish what she'd started.

It wasn't a church. It was an old mountain refuge where people brought the things they couldn't explain: voices in empty bedrooms, footsteps following their children, grief that had begun answering back.

Elias kept the place. He said I'd spent ten lives helping people, and that was why Mara hadn't been able to kill me.

“Then why does she get to stay?” I asked him when I was old enough.

“Because being good doesn't make other people fair.”

For twenty years, he taught me to sit with the dead without giving them everything they wanted. Each night, I read from his worn books and asked Mara to let go. We were three days away from the night Elias believed she could finally leave and begin another life when Nathan arrived at our door.

He was twenty-four. I was twenty. I'd met him that spring when a snake bit him on the lower trail. Elias had kept him alive until the rescue crew arrived. Nathan had come back afterward with groceries, new blankets, and reasons to see me.

That last night, he could barely stand. He said someone had slipped him an enchanted draught at a party. Ordinary doctors couldn't help with what it had done.

Elias was away. I knew enough of the old practice to recognize the fever and the strange marks around Nathan's wrists. I also knew the binding ritual he was begging me to use would cost Mara her chance to leave. It joined lives through intimacy and a spoken promise. It wasn't medicine. It was one of the dangerous things Elias had warned me never to do lightly.

“If I help you this way, you can't betray me,” I told him. “Mara will hear what you promise. So will the things in this house.”

He caught my hand.

“I want you, Anna. I want a life with you.”

“And if you stop wanting that, you tell me. You leave honestly. You don't keep me as your wife while you take someone else.”

“I swear.”

I believed he was in danger. I believed him.

Seven years later, he was still wearing his wedding ring when he slid his hand higher on Celia's back.

I put his keys on the table outside the lounge.

Mara followed me to the elevator. In its polished doors, I could see my own pale face and the place beside me where her reflection should have been.

“You warned him,” she whispered.

I pressed the button for the lobby.

“I know.”