Chapter two

I did not press approve.

At 9:40 that morning, I called my aunt Ilsabet and told her I wouldn't be flying out after all, and that I loved her, and that I was sorry for crying. She laughed and said I was being silly. I let her think so.

At 10:00 the transfer authorization expired. My phone buzzed almost immediately.

Lorcan: Hey, did the bank glitch? The transfer didn't go through. Can you redo it? Investors are waiting.

Investors. There had never been any investors. There had only been Pia's rent, and Pia's car, and Pia's bracelet.

Me: So sorry, love! The bank says I have to verify in person. I'll go this afternoon before my flight. Don't worry!

Lorcan: Okay. Love you. Don't be late for your flight.

Love you. I nearly laughed. The lie was so smooth. I wondered how many times he had practiced it.

Then I called my lawyer.

Emrys Calloway had handled my grandmother's estate for thirty years. He was a small, dry, terrifying man who wore the same gray tie every day, and I had never once heard him raise his voice. I told him I wanted every account in my name frozen to Lorcan, my money moved into a trust he could not touch, and divorce papers ready by evening.

There was a pause.

"Good instincts, Mrs. Vale," he said at last. "I had wondered when you would ask."

I sat very still with the phone against my ear. He had wondered. Everyone had seen it, apparently. Everyone but me.

"Please don't call me that," I said quietly.

"Of course. Miss Rennick."

That evening at six, I dragged my suitcase to the front door of the house I had lived in for eight years and kissed my husband on the cheek.

"Wish me luck."

"Safe flight." He smiled. God, he had such a good smile. "Text me when you land."

I drove around the corner, parked under a jacaranda tree, and turned off the engine. Then my hands began to shake again, and I let them. I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and breathed until my chest stopped hurting. I was not brave. I was only very, very tired of being stupid.

I waited exactly forty minutes.

The house was quiet when I let myself back in. I took my shoes off in the hallway. I knew which floorboards creaked, and I stepped over every one of them.

Music drifted down the stairs. Soft jazz. My jazz, the record I had bought for our anniversary. Someone laughed, low and breathless, and I recognized that laugh. I had heard it at a thousand sleepovers.

I climbed the stairs with my phone in my right hand, already recording.

The bedroom door was not even shut.

Lorcan lay across our bed, shirtless, with a glass of my grandmother's good wine in his hand. Pia sat beside him in my silk robe. Mine. She was feeding him a strawberry with her fingers.

"She's so stupid," Pia was saying, giggling. "I can't believe she was just going to hand you ten million dollars. Without even reading it."

"She will," Lorcan said. "Tomorrow, when she lands. I'll tell her the bank's fixed, and she'll do it by noon. Baby, I promise, once it clears we'll get out of this city and you'll never have to smile at her again."

"I hate hugging her," Pia sighed. "She smells like lavender. It's so old-lady."

I pushed the door open all the way.

"Sorry," I said. "Am I interrupting?"

Nobody breathes like a person who has just been caught. It is a strange, frozen, animal sort of breathing. The wineglass slid out of Lorcan's hand and shattered across the hardwood, and the wine spread across the pale floor like a wound.

"Odalys!" Pia scrambled off the bed so fast she tangled in the robe. "It's not what it looks like! He was upset, I was only comforting him—"

"In my robe," I said. "With my grandmother's wine."

"Odie, baby, listen." Lorcan was on his feet, hands up, the picture of a man who thought he could still talk his way out of a burning building. "I can explain. She's drunk, I was trying to—"

"She hates hugging me," I said, in a perfect imitation of Pia's voice. "She smells like lavender."

Pia's face went the color of paper.

I held up my phone so they could see the little red dot.

"Twenty-three minutes and eleven seconds," I said. "Every word. My favorite part was where you said the investors were imaginary."

"You can't show that to anyone," Lorcan whispered.

"Oh, I already have."

I had. I had sent the file to the Vale family group chat, the one with his mother, his grandmother, his uncle, and all fifty-three cousins, the moment I stepped onto the staircase. I had also sent it to his business partner, to the three vendors he owed money to, and to the HR director of the firm where Pia worked as a "senior brand manager."

His phone began buzzing on the nightstand. Then hers. Then both of them together, a chorus of doom.

Lorcan snatched his phone up. I watched his face as he read. I watched the blood leave it.

Marguerite Vale: Lorcan. Call me. NOW.

Uncle Desmond: Is this real??

Caspian Reeve: We're done. Don't come to the office.

"You—" His hands trembled. "Do you know what you've done?"

"I know exactly what I've done." My voice stayed level. I was proud of that, later. "Emrys Calloway will send the papers tonight. The ten million is in a trust you will never touch. Your cards are frozen. And this house is in my grandmother's name. You have until midnight to be out."

"Odalys, please!" Pia was crying now, real tears, mascara running black down her cheeks. She dropped to her knees and grabbed the hem of my coat. "We were best friends! I love you! I made a mistake!"

I looked down at her hands on my coat.

In my last life, I had begged with those exact words at a locked door. Nobody had opened it.

"Let go," I said quietly.

She didn't. So I gently pulled the coat from her fingers and turned toward the stairs.

"You can't just leave!" Lorcan lunged after me. "Where are you going to go?"

On the top step I glanced back one last time. Lorcan Vale in his boxers, with his phone lighting up his ruined face. Pia Sloane on the floor in my silk robe, sobbing.

"I'm going to go get ready," I said, "for the end of the world."

They thought I was being dramatic.

Behind me, Marguerite Vale's voice screamed out of the phone's speaker: "LORCAN! YOU STUPID, STUPID BOY!"

It was the best sound I had ever heard.

I walked out into the cool evening air and stood on the front step for a moment, just breathing. Across the street a neighbor was walking a dog. A child rode a bicycle in slow circles. The sky was pink and gold and completely ordinary.

In my last life, I had never once noticed how beautiful an ordinary evening was.

My phone would not stop buzzing. Sixty-one messages. Eighty. A hundred and four. Cousins I had not heard from in years, all typing the same thing in different words: We had no idea. We are so sorry. Was it true?

I got into my car and did not look back at the house where I had wasted eight years.

Then I cried the whole way to the hotel. Not for Lorcan. For the woman who had believed him.