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They come through the wall and land in my chest like something small and sharp, something meant to stay buried there. For one stupid second, I think I heard her wrong. I wait for her to take it back. To curse. To say she didn’t mean me.

She doesn’t.

My mouth opens against the pillow, but no sound comes out. Heat rushes up my throat, thick and bitter, and I press my fist there like I can shove it back down before it becomes real.

Malek says something. Maybe my name. Maybe hers.

I can’t hear it over the sound of myself trying not to breathe.

Cass makes a noise then. Not a sob. Not yet. Something worse. A broken little inhale, like the grief hooked a finger under her ribs and pulled.

“She has Scarlett’s face,” she says.

Everything in me goes still. My hand lifts before I tell it to.

Fingertips brush my cheekbone. My nose. My mouth.

Scarlett’s mouth.

Scarlett’s face.

The face she used to cup between her hands when she called me baby. The face she kissed before bed when the storms got bad. The face she smiled at yesterday like the world hadn’t already decided what it was going to take.

My stomach twists so hard I think I might be sick.

“She turns her head, and I see her,” Cass says, voice cracking apart. “She talks, and I hear her.”

I bite the inside of my cheek.

Blood blooms hot and metallic on my tongue.

“And then I remember Scarlett is in the ground.”

The room tilts.

No. Not room. Me.

I’m the thing coming loose.

The sheet is damp under my face. I don’t remember crying. I don’t remember starting. I just know my skin is wet and my chest hurts and there is suddenly too much of me left in a world where Scarlett isn’t.

“If I stay,” Cass whispers, and her voice sounds so ruined I almost forgive her before she finishes, “I’m going to hate her for surviving.”

For a moment, there is no house.

No bed.

No wall.

Only those words crawling under my skin, finding every soft place Scarlett ever protected, every place Cass sharpened, every place I thought was still mine.

Hate her.

For surviving.

My body folds around the pillow. I clutch it to my chest like it’s something with a heartbeat. Like it can answer for me. Like it can explain why I’m still breathing when Scarlett isn’t.

When Malek speaks again, his voice has dropped to something quiet and sharp—the kind that doesn’t need volume to cut. “Don’t you dare put that on her. She’s already carrying more than you know.”