Chapter One
The letter sits on the kitchen table for three days before I open it.
I don't know why I wait. Aunt Rosa is dead. The house still smells like her, pine cleaner and stale air from rooms left closed too long.
Her reading glasses sit on the counter beside a half-empty mug of tea. Cold now. Three days cold. I keep meaning to pour it out and I keep walking past it instead, something in me unwilling to erase even that small ordinary evidence of her.
The glasses have a small chip on the left frame where she dropped them two summers ago and had them repaired badly. Every time I pass them I see it. The smallest most irrelevant detail in the world, and the one that makes my chest go tight.
The envelope is heavy cream paper, no return address, handwritten in ink so dark it looks like it bled through from the other side. My name. NOVA BARDOT. All capitals, like a summons. Like whoever wrote it knew I'd need the extra force to open it.
There are no stamps, which means someone left it here. Walked up to this door. Came to this house where a woman just died, in the days right after, while I was still moving through the rooms in the daze of early grief.
Maybe while I was asleep. While I was standing in the backyard staring at the sky, pulled outside by something I could never name.
I make coffee I don't drink. The smell of it fills the kitchen and fades. I'm still sitting at the table with both hands wrapped around a mug that's gone cold, staring at the cream envelope and not opening it.
I shower. I stand in the bathroom afterward with the towel around my shoulders, watching the fog clear from the mirror until my own reflection comes back to me, feature by feature. Dark hair, wet and tangled, plastered against my neck. Brown eyes that look too exhausted for eighteen, red at the rims, the circles beneath them deep enough that I look like I haven't slept in days. Which is accurate.
I've been doing that a lot lately. Disappearing myself in small ways, just to see if I come back.
On the third morning I sit down across from it, pull it toward me, and tear it open.
The first page is a photograph.
Two people, young, standing in front of trees I don't recognize, tall pines with snow at their feet and a sky behind them sharp and blue from high altitude. The woman has my cheekbones, my nose, that tilt of the head I've only ever seen on my own face in mirrors when something surprises me.
She's laughing at something outside the frame, her whole body angled toward it, completely unguarded. The man beside her has his hand resting at the small of her back, easy and certain.
My hands go still on the paper.
My parents died in a car accident when I was eight months old. That's what I've always been told. That's what's on the death certificates Rosa kept in the fireproof box under her bed, the ones I found when I was eleven and she snatched from my hands so fast her coffee went sideways off the counter and she never explained why her hands were shaking.
She was grieving, I thought. I spent years convincing myself of things because the people you love keep secrets and you don't always have the vocabulary to name what you're sensing.
I didn't know what I was sensing. I just knew it was there.
I turn the photograph over.
On the back, in that same dark ink:They were alive in this photo. One week later, the Council found them.
My chest tightens. My breath goes shallow without my permission, something in my body understanding before my mind catches up, some animal part of me going quiet and cold and still.
There's a second page.
Nova,
Your aunt made me promise not to send this until she was gone. She thought she could keep you safe by keeping you ignorant. She was wrong, and I think she knew it by the end. The cough that took her wasn't natural. But you already suspect that, don't you? You found the marks on her door.
I stop reading.
My chair scrapes back so hard it hits the wall. The sound of it is too loud in the quiet house and completely wrong. My pulse is hammering in my throat as I cross the hallway in four steps and push open Rosa's bedroom door.
My palms press flat against the frame. I need something solid to hold onto. My body has gone cold from the inside out, cold from understanding something you can't ‘unfeel’.
The scratches are still there.
I found them two nights ago when I was boxing up her things. I was taking books off her nightstand, mechanically, moving through grief when it gets too large to feel directly, and I reached past the stack and my fingers caught the gouges.
