Death twenty-one. A hospital bed.
Sterling was lying in the bed inside the replay, immobilized.
Outside the door, the man he had been was speaking to a doctor.
Pull the line.
The doctor hesitated.
Sir. She is conscious.
I know.
The oxygen withdrew.
Suffocation is longer than a knife.
He watched the monitor flatten one line at a time.
In the tent, Sterling had his hands wrapped around his own throat. His nails were leaving blood.
I looked away.
The System: Pain Return progress, twenty-one of ninety-nine.
Adrian saw my face and handed me a glass of water.
Do you want a break.
I shook my head.
I can't stop.
Death thirty-seven. The Catskills.
In that loop, I had driven into a snowstorm in the mountains to bring Sterling antibiotics for a fever that had spiked while he was at a board off-site.
I had broken my ankle on an unpaved switchback. I had lost the road in the snow.
Sterling had received my GPS ping.
He had gone to pick Camille up from JFK first.
By the time he reached me, I was frozen stiff against the wheel of a car that would not start.
Now Sterling was kneeling in the snow inside the replay. His fingers had split. Blood had frozen into the lines of his palms.
He saw headlights at the bottom of the ridge.
He waved.
The car turned the other way.
Inside the car, a version of me was sitting in the passenger seat.
Get the other one first.
He broke.
Don't —
In the tent, Sterling coughed up bright blood.
The room fell apart.
A guest was already on the phone for an ambulance.
I didn't stop them.
An ambulance wasn't going to help.
This was the scaffold of his mind.
Eleanor got down on the floor and took my hem in her hand.
Avery. Please. Let him go.
I looked at her.
For ninety-nine lives, she had never asked anyone to let me go.
In the 45th loop, I had been kept in the library at the East 73rd townhouse for three nights, kneeling on the marble until my fever ran me unconscious.
Eleanor had said: Wynn girls are tough. She'll come through it.
I removed my hem from her hand.
That's only thirty-seven.
Her face fell to ash.
Why the hurry.
Death fifty-six. The abandoned warehouse in Long Island City.
I was tied to a folding chair.
A kidnapper was on the phone with Sterling.
The Long Island City project for Avery Wynn. Sign it over.
In the version of the past Sterling now had to watch, he was silent for seven seconds.
Cut your losses.
The kidnappers blinked.
I blinked, too.
That time, I had died believing he would come.
Now Sterling was tied to the same chair. He listened to his own voice come out of the phone.
Cut your losses.
When the knife came down, he didn't scream.
He only cried.
In the tent, tears were running down Sterling's face. No sound. Like a man who finally understood how alone I had been.
Death sixty-three. A wedding.
He was in a morning coat, with a red boutonnière. I was in a wedding dress.
This was the closest, in my ninety-nine prior lives, that I'd ever come to a happy ending.
Before we exchanged rings, Eleanor had walked in with a paternity test.
A fake.
She had said the child I was carrying wasn't Sterling's.
Sterling hadn't looked at me. He had turned and left.
When I'd followed him out, Thorne security had pushed me down the marble stairs.
Two of us in one fall.
In the replay, Sterling was at the top of the stairs.
This time the body that went down was his.
As he rolled, he saw the train of the dress, blood-dark.
A sound came out of him that wasn't speech.
The baby —
I closed my eyes for a beat.
I had been pregnant.
The System had granted it as a reward to push the affection arc.
I had let myself, for a brief week, believe that there would be a small life that was mine.
Later I had learned that the task world has no mercy.
The System spoke gently. Host. Emotional indicators outside normal range.
I opened my eyes.
Keep going.
Death seventy-two. Adrian's death.
Sterling stood in his replay at the edge of a flooded road outside Bridgehampton.
He saw me holding Adrian.
Adrian was bleeding from the temple. He was still trying to comfort me.
Avery. Don't be afraid.
That crash had been engineered by the Wellesley cousins to pressure Sterling into ending it with me.
When Sterling had learned who was responsible, he had suppressed the evidence.
The cousin had something on Thorne Holdings he could not let go public.
I had knelt on the floor of a hospital corridor and begged him.
He had said: The bigger picture comes first.
Adrian had died.
I had taken thirty Ambien before sunrise.
When Sterling had found me, he had said only: I didn't think she would be that fragile.
Now Sterling was the man bleeding into the asphalt.
Then he was the body next to a half-empty pill bottle. He could not get out of his own body.
The real-time Adrian, watching from the back of the tent, looked at Sterling.
His face was very cold.
I'm in this too.
I said: Yes.
He was quiet for a long time.
That's why, the first time I saw you in this lifetime, you looked at me like I had already died.
I didn't speak.
Death eighty. Camille.
She had locked me into a cold-storage room.
Sterling had arrived. Camille had cried.
I only wanted to scare her.
He had lifted my body out, and said to Camille: Don't let it happen again.
No police.
No charges.
My lungs were damaged. I had died of infection three days later.
In the replay, Sterling was the one inside the cold-storage room.
He was at the door at first, hitting it.
Camille was outside with her face wet, performing remorse.
The man he had been said, tired: Let it go.
Sterling slid down the inside of the door.
His eyes had finally come apart.
The System: Pain Return progress, eighty of ninety-nine.
In real time, Sterling opened his eyes. His mouth moved.
I heard him.
Kill me.
I crouched. I wiped a thread of blood from his mouth.
It was the same motion I had used a hundred times across ninety-nine loops, when he had been the one in pain.
Hope flared, briefly, in his eyes.
I said, very softly: No.
Death is too easy.
After the ninetieth replay, the cycle slowed.
The System said it was because Sterling's consciousness had started to resist breakdown.
I wasn't surprised.
He had always been able to endure.
He had used the endurance to take over rivals, to discipline the family, to bury truths.
He had never once aimed it at anything that was for me.
Death ninety-three. The clinic in Westchester.
To keep me safe, Sterling had committed me involuntarily.
I had been restrained, electroconvulsed, sedated.
The doctors had said I was delusional.
Because I'd kept saying I had died many times.
That stretch had lasted seven months.
At the end, I had broken a piece of glass off a bathroom mirror and cut my wrists.
In the replay, Sterling was on the treatment table.
When the current crossed him, he screamed until his voice broke.
The doctor asked, expressionless: Do you still claim you killed Avery Wynn.
He answered through tears.
I did.
The doctor turned the dial up.
The illness is progressed.
In real time, Sterling's wrist began to bleed.
It was not from a wound.
It was projection.
Death ninety-seven. The top floor of the Thorne Holdings tower.
I had obtained evidence of Thorne family criminal activity. I had been planning to take it to the District Attorney.
Sterling had stopped me.
Avery. Give me three days.
I had believed him.
Three days later, the evidence was gone.
I had been pushed off the top floor.
As the wind passed my ears, I saw Sterling come out of the fire stairs.
Too late.
He was always too late.
In the replay, Sterling went off the top floor.
He saw the pavement come up.
Death ninety-eight. A gunshot.
Death ninety-nine. The knife.
The space went quiet.
He was back in the study at the Sound house.
I was at the door.
He saw the man he had been take me into his arms.
The blade went into me from behind.
This time, the body in those arms was his.
The ninety-ninth replay ended.
Sterling did not come back at once.
The tent was a wreck.
Paramedics were around him. They could not find anything organic to treat.
Eleanor had fainted. She had been carried out.
The guests had been guided out.
Thorne's people tried to take Sterling. Maren held them off.
I sat down on the steps of the dais. The portfolio with the share transfer was on the floor.
Maren came back from the back office.
Ms. Wynn. It's clean.
I nodded.
Take it.
She hesitated. And Mr. Thorne.
Send him to the hospital.
Adrian was beside me.
And you.
I looked up.
His eyes had no reproach in them.
Only concern.
I said: Let me have a minute.
He thought about that and then put his jacket around my shoulders.
I'll be downstairs.
After he left, the System opened a settlement panel.
Secondary mission complete: 99 of 99.
Reward: Host may exit the assignment world. Departure is at your discretion.
I read the line.
Freedom.
The word I had died ninety-nine times to reach.
When I held it in my hands, it felt empty.
The System asked: Host. Will you leave.
I didn't answer.
Sirens fell off into the distance.
The room finally quieted.
I walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. The city was lit up below me.
For ninety-nine loops, I had never properly looked at this city.
I had spent every one of them following Sterling.
His firm. His family. His ulcer. His difficulties.
In the hundredth, I had finally come back to myself.
The System asked: If you leave, this world will continue. Sterling Thorne will retain his memory of the loops.
I lowered my eyes.
Will he go mad.
Possibly.
I gave a short laugh.
Good.
My phone rang.
The hospital.
I picked up.
His attending: Ms. Wynn. Mr. Thorne is conscious.
I didn't speak.
The doctor pushed, carefully: He is refusing treatment. He says he wants to see you.
I looked at my own reflection on the glass.
Tell him.
The doctor held his breath.
I said: I'm not coming.
Sterling was admitted for two weeks.
He did not contact me.
But I knew what he did.
He handed Thorne Holdings to a professional CEO from outside the family.
He had Eleanor flown out to a private clinic in the south of France.
He turned the file on Camille, Hollis Wynn, and the Wellesley cousins over to the District Attorney himself.
And he endowed a foundation.
He called it the Mei Wynn Foundation.
It funded legal representation for women trapped inside abusive family trusts, coercive partners, capital-driven coercion.
The press wrote him as a man redeemed.
I had Maren take down every piece of related coverage.
Not to shield him.
I just did not want my name to be permanently attached to his redemption.
After the engagement ceremony broke off, I apologized to Adrian.
He poured me tea on the patio of the seaside cottage at Pace Maritime's Hamptons property.
You don't owe me.
I said: I used you.
He smiled.
I agreed to it.
I went quiet.
He looked out over the water.
Avery. You don't have to give me an answer fast. When I said yes, I didn't mean only in a strategic sense.
Something low in my chest moved.
His voice was gentle, with no pressure under it.
I like you. That's my business.
When you can like the world again — that's yours.
I held the cup. The heat reached my fingers slowly.
The System opened. Host. Departure countdown is available at any time.
I said, inside my head: Hold it.
The System was surprised. You're staying.
I looked at the side of Adrian's face.
I want to try.
Not trying to love someone.
Trying to be alive.
A few days later, Sterling was discharged.
He did not come to see me.
He had his lawyer deliver a box.
There were ninety-nine sealed envelopes inside.
One letter, for each death.
I did not open any.
I put the box in a safety-deposit box at the Citizens Bank branch on Madison Avenue.
Some apologies, accepting does not mean forgiving.
It only means I am no longer afraid to look at them.