Chapter Two

AMARA

I was dead.

And apparently, my sister was a terrible actress.

Sasha stood in the middle of the room crying her eyes out, and all I wanted to do was grab her by the shoulders and shake her.

You suck at this. She knew it. I knew it. The only people who didn’t know it were the ones busy being actually devastated—my mother, folded into herself like something broken, and my father, his hand pressed flat against his chest as if he could hold his own heart in place.

I watched them and felt something I didn’t have a name for. Not quite grief. Not quite rage. Something in between, something with teeth.

Then there was Antonio.

Antonio, who killed me. Antonio, letting people wrap their arms around him. Antonio, accepting condolences with the practiced ease of a man who had rehearsed this moment and found it suited him.

You are a damn liar, I thought, standing close enough that I could have reached out and touched his face. And I will ruin your life.

I didn’t know if the dead could make promises. But I made one anyway.

I started pacing—back and forth across the room the way I always did when my thoughts moved faster than my body could keep up. Except now my feet made no sound. Nothing I did made any sound at all. I passed through Sasha’s arm without meaning to, and she didn’t flinch, didn’t shiver, didn’t feel a thing.

What am I supposed to do? The thought spun in circles. What can I do? I can’t touch anything. I can’t be heard. I can’t—

The room changed.

No flash of light. No sound. Just a stillness that arrived all at once—total and absolute, like the world had been cupped between two hands and held. My mother’s crying stopped. My father’s murmuring stopped. Antonio, Sasha, the grief, my body still on the floor with my bracelet still on its wrist—everything froze, suspended, like a painting of a moment instead of the moment itself.

And then someone was standing in the middle of the room.

I stumbled back.

She hadn’t walked in. Hadn’t appeared in any way I could explain. She was simply there—the way a fact is there, undeniable, not requiring an entrance.

The air around her seemed organized differently, like everything else in the room had quietly been arranging itself in relation to her without knowing it. She was neither old nor young. Her eyes were the color of the sky in that thin silver hour between dusk and dark. Light clung to her that had nothing to do with any light source in the room.

She was looking directly at me.

I pressed myself against the wall—then remembered walls meant nothing to me anymore.

“Who are you?” My voice came out smaller than I intended. “What is this? What’s happening?”

I stopped, realizing her eyes were following me. “Wait—you can see me, right? Wait, how is that possible? The others can’t do that. What are you?”

She smiled, and the look cracked something open in my chest—a familiarity I couldn’t place, like a melody you know but can’t name.

“Who am I?” she echoed, tilting her head. “Amara. You know who I am.”

“I don’t.” I shook my head. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then, quietly, as if she had all the time in every world—

I am your spirit guide.

I stared at her.

“My—” I stopped. Started again. “My spirit guide.”

Yes.

“I have a spirit guide.”

You have always had a guide.

“And you never once thought to—” My voice cracked as I gestured at everything frozen around us, at my mother, my father, my body on the floor. “Show up? Any time before now?”

I showed up many times, she said simply. You simply couldn’t see me.

I opened my mouth, then closed it again.

Something inside me tightened painfully at that—at the thought of all the times I had been alone and maybe hadn’t been as alone as I believed. I swallowed it down.

She stepped toward me, and the light around her shifted—warmer, like the last of an evening sun bleeding gold across the sky before it gives way to night.

I am glad you can see me now, she said, and there was something in her voice that felt like it had been waiting a long time to be spoken. Though I wish the circumstances were different. It is time, my dear. It is time to come home.

The words were soft. Kind, even.

They still hit like a door closing.

“Home,” I repeated.

Home.

“What home?” I asked quietly.

The one where your spirit rests, she said.

I looked at my mother. At the tears frozen mid-fall on her cheeks, at the way her whole body had curved inward like she was trying to protect a wound no one could reach. I looked at my father's hand still pressed to his chest. At Antonio, performing his grief so fluently — so *effortlessly* — in the arms of people who would never think to question him.

At Sasha, with her fake tears.

Something hardened in me. Slowly. Like a fist closing.

"Not yet," I said.

My spirit guide watched me without surprise.

"I have never —" I started, then steadied myself, pulling the words up from somewhere beneath all the grief and rage and disbelief of the last hour. "Not once, in my entire life, have I asked anything of you. I accepted what you gave and what you took, and I never once stretched out my hand and said *give me this.* Not once."

She didn't deny it.

"I'm asking now." My voice didn't shake, and I was grateful for that. Grateful for this one small thing still holding. "Give me one more chance. One. Let me go back and right these wrongs — not just what they did to me, but everything I left unfinished. With Antonio. With Sasha." I stopped. Swallowed. "And before any of it — with Jason."

I hadn't said his name out loud in a long time. It landed in the frozen room and sat there, heavier than everything else.

Something moved across my spirit guide's expression. Not softness exactly. Something older. Something that had watched human hearts break and mend and break again across more years than I could count.

*There is a price,* she said. *Greater than you may be willing to pay.*

"I will pay whatever price you name."

*That is easily said, Amara, when you do not yet know what it is.*

"Then tell me," I said, "and let me decide."

She regarded me for a long, unhurried moment. The frozen room held its breath around us. My mother's tears hung suspended in the air. The whole world waited.

*Are you certain this is what you want?*

"Yes."I said without hesitation or apology.

She didn't ask again.

*Then you will return.*

The words settled over me like a hand placed gently over a wound.

*You have three hundred and sixty-five days, Amara. One year from the moment your feet touch the earth again. When that time is done, you come home. No argument. No negotiation. No extension.*

Something dropped in my chest. "Three hundred and sixty-five days." I turned the number over slowly, measuring it against everything I needed to do and finding it painfully small. "Can't you give me more? Two years, even. Surely —"

*No.*

*Three hundred and sixty-five days to settle what was left unfinished. To seek the justice you are owed. To face what you spent a lifetime running from.* Her silver gaze held mine. *And then you are home.*

A year. Antonio and his rehearsed grief. Sasha and her careful silences. Five years of lies I hadn't seen until it was too late. And underneath all of it, older and quieter than any of it — Jason. That wound I had packed away and called healed without ever once checking if it was.

All of it. In one year.

It wasn't enough. I already knew it wasn't enough.

But it was what I had. And I had learned, in the minutes since my death, that you don't waste what you're given.

"Fine," I said. "I accept the terms."

*Good.* Something shifted in her expression — deliberate now, careful. The way someone looks just before they place something irreversible in your hands. *Then we come to the matter of the price.*

The room felt smaller suddenly. The air between us different — charged, the way the atmosphere changes just before a storm decides to break.

I lifted my chin.

"Tell me," I said quietly. "What is it?"