Chapter two

“Sign it, Lucan. Page four too.”

He stared at the divorce papers on the kitchen table, then at me. I had been up since five, dressed, packed, and calm. In six years he had never seen me calm.

“You’re serious.”

“The compliance office, or your signature. Pick one.”

He laughed, short and sharp, and I watched him do the math. A lender with a deadline. A wife whose savings he could no longer reach. A firm that would not forgive a screenshot. And under all of it, one comfortable belief: Ione always comes back.

He signed with a flourish, like a man being generous to a child. “When you come crawling, don’t expect me to forgive you right away.”

I checked both signatures before I answered. “I won’t be back.”

He was still smirking when I walked out. I let him. Men who smirk don’t check the mail.

I took off my wedding ring in the elevator and dropped it into the pocket of my coat, where it clinked against my keys. It felt lighter than I expected. I did not look back at the building. I had spent six years making that apartment feel like a home. It had never once felt like mine.

Finch & Holloway took up the fourteenth floor of a glass tower downtown. Alaric Finch, gray and careful and in his sixties, rose when I walked in as if he were seeing a ghost.

“Ms. Calloway. Thank God. We have been writing to you for seven months.”

“I never received anything.”

“Registered letters, to your home address.” His mouth thinned. “Your husband signed for every one.”

Lucan. Of course.

Seven months of registered mail, signed for in my own kitchen, in my own husband’s neat handwriting. I thought of every evening he had kissed my cheek and asked what was for dinner. Some betrayals arrive all at once. This one had arrived one envelope at a time.

He slid a folder across the desk. My grandfather Walter Calloway, a recluse I had met twice, who mailed me a birthday card every year with a twenty-dollar bill inside, had died in the spring. He had left me everything. I read the figures three times: forty-three million dollars in liquid assets, a mining portfolio, and Calloway Ridge, six hundred acres of mountain forest two hours north.

“There is one condition,” Finch said. “He asked that you receive this in person.”

He handed me a brass key on a worn cord, and a sealed envelope.

I almost refused it. Some part of me knew that once I took it, there would be no going back to the woman who had walked in.

The moment my fingers closed around the key, heat shot up my arm. The room tilted. My vision deepened, as if a lens had clicked into place behind my eyes.

I tore the envelope open. My grandfather’s handwriting was blocky, in blue ink.

Ione. If you are reading this, the world has started to look wrong to you. It did to me too. We Calloways see things. Go to the cellar at the Ridge. Be careful and trust no one.Prepare. — W.

I read it twice. The heat faded from my palm. The room looked normal again, but not quite. Something had been added to it, a color I had no name for yet.

I crossed to the window and looked down fourteen floors on the street. The key was warm against my palm, and the lens behind my eyes settled into focus. A man walking a dog. A courier on a bike. A woman with a stroller. And on two of them, faint as breath on glass, a thin black line crawling beneath the skin of the neck.

Neither had been bitten by anything I could see. The thread did not need a bite to spread. I pressed my hand flat against the cold glass and understood that Harrowgate was not where this started. It was only where it had started to show.

“Mr. Finch, did my grandfather ever say why?”

“Never. He sent me a case of canned peaches every Christmas with a note that read Check your pantry.” He almost smiled. “I assumed he was eccentric.”

“I want access to the funds today,” I said. “And the deed to the Ridge transferred this week.”

“That usually takes a month—”

“I have thirteen days.” It slipped out. I corrected myself. “I’d like it done quickly. I’ll pay for the speed.”

He studied me. Something grim and tired settled in his face, and he picked up the phone. “I’ll see what I can do.”

While he made calls, I stepped into the outer office. A young receptionist sat at the front desk, typing with one hand. Her other hand was wrapped in gauze and held close to her chest. Her name tag read Tamsin.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m fine.” She smiled tiredly. “A stray bit me on my way yesterday. Shaking, foaming, totally wrong. I got my tetanus shot. I just feel feverish.”

I looked at the bandage, and I saw it.

A black thread, finer than hair, curled out from under the gauze and crept up her wrist, branching beneath the skin like ink in water. It pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Nobody else in the room could see it. I knew that the way I knew my own name.

I had seen that thread once before, on a man who was still smiling and still talking minutes before he turned.

“Tamsin. Where did the dog come from?”

“The Harrowgate shelter, I think. A whole pack wandered out of there.”

The thread pulsed.

“Go to the ER today,” I said. “Not tomorrow. Please.”

She laughed, a little embarrassed. “It’s a dog bite.”

I wrote my number on a sticky note and pressed it into her good hand. “Call me if the fever climbs.”

Tamsin took it with a look I knew well, the look of a person being kind to someone she thought was overreacting. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll… think about it.” She coughed into her sleeve, and the thread under the gauze gave a slow, deliberate pulse, like a sleeper turning over.

I walked away before I could say anything more. Pushing too hard would make her dig in. In my last life I had learned that people believed what was comfortable until it bit them.

Finch caught me at the elevator with the folder under his arm. “The funds will clear by Friday, and the deed will follow.” He hesitated. “Your grandfather left one instruction for me, in writing. If you ever came asking for speed, I was to give it to you and ask no questions.” His voice dropped. “I intend to honor that, Ms. Calloway. But I would be grateful, someday, for an explanation.”

“Someday,” I said, “you’ll have one.”

In the elevator I leaned against the mirrored wall and wrote a list on my phone. Shelter. Food. Water. Medicine. Weapons. A body strong enough to use them. People I could trust, which would be the hardest item of all.

Thirteen days. And somewhere in the city, the sickness was already asleep inside people who thought they had a cold.