Chapter Five

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## AMARA

I turned.

For a moment I couldn't speak. The words dissolved somewhere between my chest and my throat, and I stood there with my mouth slightly open, staring at her the way you stare at something your brain refuses to process.

"Spi—" I swallowed. "Spirit guide?"

She didn't answer immediately. She was watching me with an expression I hadn't seen on her face before — not the calm, measured composure from before, but something harder. Something close to displeasure.

"Amara."

Her voice filled the room in a way that had nothing to do with volume. It didn't echo so much as *settle*, pressing into the corners, making the air feel heavier. It was the same voice, but stripped of every warmth it had carried before.

"Yes," I said. My own voice came out smaller than I intended.

And then it hit me — properly, finally, all at once — the way things do when your body catches up to what your mind has been refusing. I had died. Not metaphorically. Not in a dream. I had felt the fall, felt the air, felt the nothing that came after. And this woman standing at the foot of my bed was real, and the 365 days were real, and none of it — not a single second of it — was something I had imagined.

"I gave you three hundred and sixty-five days," she said, "and already you are thinking of changing fate."

"No." The word came out too quickly. I stretched my lips into something approximating a smile. "No, of course not. I wasn't — I was just thinking. You know how it is. Thoughts. They come and go, they don't mean anything—"

*I cannot believe she heard that.*

"I did," she said flatly.

My smile collapsed. I stared at her. "You can hear my—"

"Every word."

I pressed my lips together and said nothing. Then, carefully, as though I could police my own mind, I tried not to think at all — which of course made me think everything at once. The ring. The blue dress. Antonio's face when I said yes. Sasha standing at the edge of the crowd with a flute of champagne, watching with that soft smile I had always mistaken for love.

Could she hear all of that?

She didn't react. She simply waited, and the waiting was worse than any accusation.

She looked at me the way you look at someone who is about to make a catastrophic mistake — not with cruelty, but with the particular weariness of someone who has watched it happen before. When she finally spoke again, her voice had not softened, but it had slowed.

"You have one chance," she said, and the room seemed to contract around her voice. "One chance, Amara. Your revenge. Your reckoning. Three hundred and sixty-five days to take back what was taken from you." She paused, and the silence she left was not gentle. "If you use that time trying to rewrite what was written — trying to undo what was done rather than answer it — you go back. Immediately. No second warning. No negotiation."

"Spirit guide—"

But she was already gone.

Not gradually. Not with ceremony. One moment she was there, solid and certain at the foot of the bed, and the next the room was just a room again — the ordinary quiet of a London morning, the faint sound of traffic bleeding back through the walls, the duvet slightly rumpled where I'd been sitting.

I stayed very still for a moment, listening. Not to the room — to myself. My heartbeat was uneven, a stuttering rhythm that hadn't quite settled back to normal. My hands were cold. I pressed them flat against my thighs and looked at the mirror — just a mirror now, showing nothing but the bedroom and my own face, younger than I remembered, eyes wide and very dark.

I had faced Antonio this morning without flinching. I had held Sasha's voice against my ear and kept my own perfectly steady. But a few minutes alone with the spirit guide and I was sitting here feeling like a child who had been caught.

That needed to stop.

I let out a long, unsteady breath and tried to think clearly.

So that was the rule. Not *change nothing* — but *don't try to escape it*. Don't sidestep the marriage, don't refuse the ring, don't try to wake up in a different life. Whatever I did with these 365 days, I had to do it from inside the story. I had to walk back into that flat tonight, in the blue dress, and let the room shout *surprise*, and watch Antonio drop to one knee.

I could picture it with terrible clarity. The way the room would go silent right before the door opened. The particular darkness of Sasha's hallway before the lights came up. I had always assumed in that version of my life that the surprise was *mine* — that I was the one who had no idea. But of course Sasha had known. Sasha had planned it. Sasha had stood beside the light switch with her hand already raised, and when she'd looked across the room at Antonio just before the door opened, what had passed between them in that glance?

I had been looking the wrong way. I had been looking at the door, at the dark, waiting to see who was coming through.

I would not be looking the wrong way tonight.

And then — only then — maybe could I decide what came next.

I sat back down on the edge of the bed and looked at my hands for a long moment.

*Alright,* I thought carefully, in case she was still listening. *Alright. I understand.*

I reached for my phone.

There was still time before seven o'clock. Hours, in fact — hours I had wasted in my previous life doing my hair, choosing between earrings, rehearsing what I would say to Antonio's colleagues about my work, my plans, my perfectly ordinary future.

I put the phone down on the mattress beside me and sat with the quiet for a moment.

Tonight I would put on the blue dress. I would walk through Sasha's door. I would let the room erupt. And when Antonio lowered himself to one knee with that diamond catching the light, I would look at his face — really look at it — and I would finally see everything I had been too happy to notice the first time.

I stood up.

There was a great deal to think about, and I intended to think about all of it.

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