REBORN BEFORE THE END: MY EX'S FAMILY WILL STARVE FIRST

The cold was the first thing to stop hurting.

That was how I knew I was really dying.

I was sitting against the cracked wall of a pharmacy that had been looted down to its bare shelving, my knees pulled to my chest, my good winter coat long gone.

Garrick's mother had needed it, she'd said. Winnifred Hale always needed whatever I had.

Above the dead city, the sky was still open.

A long wound of silver light had been hanging in the east for six days, quiet and wrong, as if the world had been unzipped.

Nobody could explain it. Everyone had stopped trying.

Things had started coming out of it on the first night, and the temperature had been falling since the second.

I had stopped counting days around the time I stopped feeling my fingers.

"Dess," I whispered to nobody. My own name. It was the only thing I still owned.

Everything else had belonged to the Hales for months.

My savings, which Garrick called "our future" while he moved it, one transfer at a time, into accounts I had never seen.

The apartment I had paid off with six years of overtime, signed over to his mother's name "for tax reasons."

Even the private bunker, the one I had helped him pay for, the one he bragged about at dinner parties, had a steel door that closed in my face on the first night.

I had pounded on that door until my hands bled. I could hear them inside. I could hear music.

Then Garrick's voice came through the speaker, almost kind.

"Dess, be reasonable. There's only room for people who contribute."

A pause, then a small laugh I would hear for the rest of my short life.

"And honestly, babe, with your size, you'd eat through the supplies in a week."

Behind him, a woman laughed too. Light. Pretty. Familiar.

Cressida Lane. The "work friend" who had hugged me at my own birthday party.

I was twenty nine years old when I understood that a woman could be thrown away not because she had done something wrong, but because she had been useful for too long.

The wind picked up. Somewhere down the street, something that was not a dog howled, and I didn't even flinch.

That was the strange mercy of freezing: the fear went numb right along with everything else.

If I could do it again, I thought. The thought came slowly, like it was wading through snow.

I wouldn't give them one more dollar. Not one. I'd buy every can of food in this city.

I'd lock every door they ever needed. And I would watch them beg.

It was a petty last wish. I didn't care.

It was warm, the way anger is warm, and I held onto it until my eyelids got heavy and the silver light in the sky blurred into a soft white nothing.

The cold stopped hurting. Then everything did

The first thing I felt was heat.

Not the cruel, fevered kind. The ordinary kind. A blanket pulled up to my chin.

Sunlight pressing against my eyelids.

The faint smell of coffee and, underneath it, Garrick's expensive cologne, the one that always made my stomach turn once I knew what it was covering.

I lay perfectly still.

This is what it's like, I thought. Dying. You imagine the warmth.

But my heart was pounding. I could hear it in my ears, strong and stubborn.

I could feel my fingers curling into the sheets, and the sheets were soft, and the fingers were mine.

I opened my eyes.

White ceiling. A crack in the corner I had been asking the landlord to fix for two years.

The pale gray curtains I had picked out myself, still hanging crooked because Garrick never helped me level the rod.

My bedroom.

My bedroom, in the apartment that was still, for the moment, mine.

I sat up so fast the room tilted.

I pressed both palms against my chest, then my stomach, then my hips, the soft, full curves Garrick's family had spent years sighing at.

Fix yourself, Dess. Have you thought about the gym, Dess? Garrick deserves a partner who takes care of herself.

I had never loved my body more than I did at that exact moment, because it was warm. Because it was breathing. Because it was here.

I laughed once, a cracked, wet sound, and then slapped a hand over my mouth because I could hear the shower running.

Garrick was home.

My whole body went cold for a different reason this time.

Carefully, quietly, I reached for my phone on the nightstand. My hands were shaking so badly I nearly dropped it.

The screen lit up.

Friday, December 12.

I stared at the date until the letters blurred.

I knew another date. Every survivor did, the way you know the day of a funeral.

The day the sky tore open was March twelfth. I counted on my fingers, then counted again, because I didn't trust myself.

Nineteen days left in December. Thirty one in January. Twenty eight in February. Twelve in March.

Ninety days.

I had ninety days.

I put the phone down very gently, as if it might shatter, and pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until I saw sparks.

Breathe. Breathe, Dess. You're not dead. You're not freezing. You have ninety days, and you know exactly what is coming.

When I trusted my hands again, I opened my banking app.

I already knew what I would see, and still my stomach dropped.

Balance: $4,212.60.

In September, that account had held sixty-one thousand dollars.

Six years of overtime, holiday shifts, and skipped vacations.

Garrick had told me he was "putting it to work" in a joint investment.

I had actually thanked him. I had actually cooked him dinner that night to celebrate.

I scrolled through the transfers. Small ones at first. Then bigger ones.

Every single one was labeled with some boring, harmless word. Fees. Transfer and adjustment.

Sixty thousand dollars, gone in three months, and I had never once checked.

Not this time.

In my first life, I had found out about the money the week before the apocalypse, when it was far too late to matter.

Now I had ninety days. Ninety days to take back what was mine, to stockpile every last thing a person could need when the world went cold, and to make sure the Hales never got near any of it.

The shower shut off.

My pulse jumped, but I made my face go soft and sleepy.

I had spent six years learning to look harmless around that man. I could do it one more morning.

Garrick came out of the bathroom with a towel slung around his hips, hair damp, smiling that easy, handsome smile that had once made me feel chosen.