CHAPTER ONE
My dead mother-in-lawwas standing in my bathroom mirror, and she was criticizing my hair.
“You look terrible,” Rosaria said. “Like something the cat dragged in and then dragged back out because it was not worth the effort.”
I gripped the edge of the sink so hard my knuckles went white. Water dripped down my face from where I’d been splashing it, trying to survive the hot flash that had sent me stumbling down the hallway thirty seconds ago. My heart was attempting to exit my body through my throat.
“You’re not real,” I said.
“I am standing right here.”
“You’redead.”
“Obviously.” She smoothed down a pearl button on her cardigan, which was insane because she didn’t have hands anymore, she didn’t haveanything, she was dead and buried in St. Anthony’s cemetery and I had worn black to her funeral even though she’d spent thirty years telling her son he could do better than me.
I spun around. The bathroom was empty. Just me and the claw-foot tub and the pedestal sink and the soap dish I’dknocked to the floor when I’d first seen her. Shattered ceramic everywhere.
I turned back to the mirror.
Still there. Silver hair perfectly set. Pearls at her throat. That expression of perpetual disappointment I knew better than my own face.
“This is a stress hallucination,” I said. “This is my brain finally cracking. I’ve been eating cereal for dinner for three months and talking to myself and this is just—this is a thing that happens to women my age, probably, there’s probably a pamphlet?—“
“Gina.” Rosaria’s voice cut through my rambling like a knife through my overcooked brisket, which she had complained about at Easter dinner four years ago and clearly never forgotten. “Stop babbling. I do not have time for your hysterics.”
“Myhysterics? You’re the dead woman in my mirror!”
“Yes, and I have been trying to get your attention for a week, but you are apparently impossible to reach unless you are having one of your episodes.”
The hot flash. The heat that had started in my chest and spread outward like wildfire, sending me stumbling to the bathroom or sticking my head in the freezer at—I glanced at the clock on the wall—nine-thirty at night, desperate for something cold. The hot flashes had been getting worse. So much worse. My doctor had said it was normal, that menopause could be “disruptive,” which was the understatement of the century.
She had not mentioned anything about it making you see dead people.
Although maybe she should have. Aunt Amelia’s cottage was full of things I’d been avoiding since I moved in. The books on her shelves with titles likeConversations Beyond the VeilandA Medium’s Guide to Spiritual Boundaries. The dried herbs still hanging in the kitchen, giving off a faint smell I couldn’t identify.The collection of antique mirrors in the spare bedroom, at least a dozen of them, all different sizes, all covered with sheets like she’d been hiding them from something. Or hiding somethinginthem.
I’d told myself she was just eccentric. A little odd. The family’s weird aunt who lived alone in Maine and never came to holidays.
“I did not die of shock,” Rosaria said.
“What?”
“At the dinner. When Salvatore announced your little divorce.” She saiddivorcethe way she’d always said it—like it was a communicable disease. “Everyone thinks I died of shock. That my heart simply gave out from the stress of learning my son’s marriage was ending.”
“That’s what the doctors said. That’s what—“ My voice cracked. “Everyone blamed me. Your sister called me a murderer at the funeral.”
“My sister is an idiot who married a man with a toupee. Her judgment cannot be trusted.” Rosaria’s eyes met mine in the mirror, and for the first time in thirty years of knowing this woman, I saw something other than criticism. I saw rage. “I was murdered, Gina. Someone poisoned my tea.”
The word hung in the air. Murdered.
Three months ago, I'd let Sal keep the house. I didn't want it—didn't want the kitchen where I'd cooked ten thousand dinners nobody thanked me for, didn't want the bedroom where I'd lain awake for years listening to him breathe and wondering when I'd stopped caring if he stopped. Let him have it. Let him have the granite countertops and the three-car garage and every memory I was trying to outrun.
Somehow, the kids took that as a confession. As if walking away from the house meant I was the one who'd broken the marriage, not the one who'd finally stopped pretending itwasn't already broken. Josie called me a selfish monster. Nick just stopped calling at all. They were twenty-eight and twenty-six—grown adults with jobs and opinions about wine—and they'd picked sides like children choosing teams at recess. Only Carmen still talked to me, still believed that leaving her father after thirty years wasn't an act of cruelty but an act of survival.
So I'd come here. Aunt Amelia's cottage in Starfall Bay, inherited and unused for years, one town over from my old life. Close enough that I wasn't running. Far enough that I didn't have to see a Ferraro at the grocery store every time I needed milk. I'd come here to lick my wounds. To figure out who I was when I wasn't someone's wife or mother or punching bag.
I had not come here to be haunted by my mother-in-law.
“Even if that’s true,” I said slowly, “why are you tellingme?”
