The blast was small. It was big enough.
Cassie made it across the terrace into the building.
Silas's back was running blood and he was already trying to push up to his elbow.
I held him down.
"Are you insane."
He looked up at me. His lips were white.
"She still has things on her."
— Cannot let her near you. —
I pulled the silk scarf off my neck and pressed it onto the seam in his shirt.
"There are police."
Silas stared at my hand.
— She touched me. —
I said, cold, "Stop."
He said, even more quietly, "All right."
In the next second a scream tore out of the building.
Sylvie had gone in.
My face went stiff.
Sylvie. The idiot.
In two lifetimes she had been cruel in a clean, easy way. Reborn, she was sorry in a clean, easy way. She had decided, somewhere along the way, that she owed me her body.
Silas tried to lever up again. I was already on my feet and moving for the stairwell.
He shouted my name into the smoke.
On the third floor, in a corridor that smelled of bleach and burnt paint, Cassie had her arm around Sylvie's throat.
The paring knife was at Sylvie's carotid.
Sylvie was shaking and still cursing.
"Cassie, you ungrateful little — we took you in, my family took you in, you stabbed my sister-in-law in the back, you'll burn for —"
Cassie slapped her once across the face.
"Your family. Your family kept me on hand because Silas might have wanted me one day. I was decoration. I was the understudy."
She saw me at the top of the stairs and her eyes lit.
"Wren. Come here."
Sylvie sobbed. "Don't. I'm not worth it."
I stopped at the head of the corridor.
Cassie pressed the blade. A bead of red started down Sylvie's throat.
"I'll count to three."
"One."
Silas dragged himself up after me, blood spreading on the back of his shirt. He put himself in front of me.
"Cassandra. It's me you want."
Cassie shook her head, easy.
"No. I want her."
She turned the smile on me, the sweet one.
"Wren. You don't love Silas anymore, do you. Then prove it."
She slid the knife into Sylvie's hand and lifted a small glass syringe to the inside of her own forearm.
"There's something from the Penhallow Institute lab in here. If it goes in, I die."
Sylvie's hand shook so hard the blade rattled.
Cassie tipped her head against Sylvie's. "Have Sylvie kill me. Then I'll let you go."
Sylvie collapsed. "I'm not a murderer."
Cassie said into her ear, "If you don't, I let Wren die."
Silas's voice, behind me, suddenly very level: "I'll do it."
He took a step forward.
I caught the cuff of his shirt.
He looked back at me.
The line of his thought, when it came, was almost soft.
— Don't look at me, Wren. —
I let go of his cuff.
Whatever light had just come up under Silas's eyes went out.
I walked past him.
"Cassie. You've been playing this scene a long time. Aren't you tired."
Her smile stiffened.
I looked at the syringe in her hand.
"That isn't poison. It's a sedative."
Her pupils contracted.
I went on.
"You aren't going to die. In two lifetimes you have not put yourself through anything for me. You aren't going to start now."
"You want a Thorne or a cop to hurt you. You want a clip of it on the news. You want to walk out of this with a lawyer and a victim narrative."
Charles and the State Police came up the back stairs and stopped at the corridor's far end.
Cassie's face changed colors.
I pulled out my phone and turned the screen toward her. The Instagram live count was at four thousand, six hundred and climbing. The Foundation's communications director was on the viewer list. Three foundation board members. Two reporters from the Globe I had quietly DM'd that morning.
From the moment Cassie had grabbed Sylvie, I had been broadcasting.
Every line she had said, the audience had heard.
She looked, for the first time, like she had run out of moves.
"Wren. You set me up."
I stepped in.
"I learned it from you."
Cassie shoved Sylvie aside and lunged at me.
Silas tried to put his body in front of mine.
This time I did not step behind him.
I dropped low and brought my heel into the side of Cassie's knee, hard.
She went down with a sound that was not the sound she had been making.
The State Police were on her before she stopped screaming.
Sylvie crumpled into Eleanor's arms and cried.
Eleanor, holding her daughter, looked at me. Her mouth was trembling.
"Wren —"
I cut the live feed.
My phone had forty missed calls.
This was going to blow open. The Thornes could not put the lid back on. Cassandra could not slip out.
Silas was leaning on the wall, completely white. The cut on his back was still bleeding through the scarf.
I walked past him.
He said my name. "Wren."
I stopped.
"Go to a hospital."
His eyes flickered.
— She's still looking after me. —
I added, "If you die in this corridor it'll complicate the police interview."
The light I had seen in him went out.
He almost smiled.
"All right."
The internet exploded the day Cassandra was booked.
The birthday-dinner recording. The Hawthorne Pines livestream. The trail of older Foundation press releases that had quietly buried me twice. Every one of them landed on the same evening, on every site that mattered.
The columnists who had called me a social climber in life one started deleting old posts and writing apologies.
The forum users who had said I deserved Danbury were now calling Cassandra Penhallow a sociopath.
I watched the late justice arrive and mostly found it loud.
Xavier was picked up that night.
He had not been a lawyer in any meaningful sense. He had been a long-term contractor of the Penhallow Institute, attached to its "longitudinal subject observation program." He had been paid to watch what I did in different timelines, and to nudge.
It sounded absurd.
I had died twice. Absurd was admissible.
The State Police asked me, gently, if I could remember the exact medication regimen at Hartwell.
I could. I had not been able to forget a name on those bottles.
Silas was in a private room at Mass General for six days.
The Thornes came to me every day.
Eleanor sent soup. I had it sent back.
Sylvie brought a clean Tiffany box and another set of apology gifts. I accepted the box and asked her to leave.
Charles came least often. He only ever talked about the case.
Silas was the strange one.
He stopped coming to my door. He stopped insisting on a meeting. He had me on his contact list and he had stopped using it.
He sent one text a day.
Dressing changed.
Cassandra's trial date set.
Didn't bother you today.
I never answered.
On the seventh day my phone rang. Sylvie was crying so hard the words came in chunks.
"Ms. Marlowe. My brother is gone."
I set down the glass I was holding.
"Call the police."
"We did. He left a letter. There's only the letter."
I was quiet.
Sylvie's voice broke. "Ms. Marlowe, I know you don't want anything to do with him. But the doctor said the wound is still infected. He left all of his antibiotics on the nightstand."
I closed my eyes.
"Photograph it. Send it to me."
The photo came within a minute.
Plain hotel notepaper, his handwriting, the slope of it like someone who had been taught penmanship at seven and never had to give it up.
Wren,
I remembered the part after you died in the first life.
I looked for you for three hundred and twelve days. I found you behind an old boathouse on the Connecticut shore, under a willow.
I sent Cassie to prison. I gave Sylvie the firm. Then I went back to the boathouse.
I could not die there. Someone told me I would have one more chance to save you if I came back.
So I came back. I thought if I kept you close enough you wouldn't die again.
I was wrong.
The third time, I cannot be the one who keeps you anywhere.
I'm going to finish one last thing.
Don't come looking.
Silas
I read the last line over twice.
Don't come looking.
The shape of the line was the shape of a will.