Chapter two

Good luck.

"Sign it, Vera."

A pen clicked against a table near my hand. I opened my eyes. My cheeks were wet, but I wasn't crying.

I was sitting at one end of a long dining table under a crystal chandelier, and six people were staring at me.

"Vera." A silver-haired woman in pearls tapped the tablecloth with one finger. "We don't have all day. Sign the papers and spare us the scene."

"Sorry," I said. My voice came out lower than it should have. "I think you've got the wrong person."

"Vera, don't," said the man sitting beside her. He looked about thirty, and he had one hand resting on a folder. "Don't make this harder than it has to be."

"Make what harder? I don't even know where I am. Is this a murder mystery dinner? Because I never RSVP'd."

Nobody laughed. A young woman in a white dress, who was clinging to the man's arm, sniffled. "Damon, she doesn't look well."

Damon.

The man pushed the folder across the table. The top page read Petition for Dissolution of Marriage, and a signature was already inked at the bottom: Damon Lockhart.

Vera. Damon Lockhart. The silver-haired woman had to be his mother, Margaret. The girl in white had to be Lily.

My stomach dropped as if I'd missed a stair. "Give me a second," I said.

"You've had two years," Margaret said.

"Then you can spare one more minute."

I pulled a phone out of the clutch on my lap and checked the screen. It said October 17th, 12:07 p.m.

I knew this scene. I had read it twice. I wasn't just inside Dawn of Ruin. I was Vera Lockhart, the wife everyone in the book wanted gone.

In chapter three, Margaret's diamond brooch goes missing, and it turns up in Vera's handbag. Vera cries and begs, and Margaret slaps her. Damon signs the divorce papers and has her thrown out with nothing. Twelve days later, the dead start walking at Westbrook Memorial Hospital. Three days after that, in chapter seventeen, Damon pushes Vera out of an SUV so Lily can escape.

That gave me twelve days until the world ended, and fifteen until I died.

"The brooch was found in your bag, Vera," Margaret said, tapping a velvet box. "You've been stealing from this family for two years. Sign, and we won't call the police."

"Please, Vera," Lily whispered. "Just sign. I don't want anyone to get hurt."

Lily had hugged me at the front door when I arrived. In chapter three hundred and twelve, the author gives her one line in her private diary: The brooch was easy. A hug and a zipper.

"Margaret," I said. "Do you still have the camera in your dressing room?"

"What camera?"

"The one you installed in March, after the burglary. It points at the vanity." The author mentions that camera in chapter twelve and then forgets it exists. I'd flagged it in my notes as a plot hole. "Pull up this morning's footage. Or I'll call the police myself and report a brooch stolen by somebody who hugged me at the door."

"Vera, you're being dramatic," Lily said.

"Humor me." I smiled at her. "Tablet, please."

Margaret stared at me for a long moment. Then she snapped her fingers at the butler.

He read the log aloud in the flat voice of a man who has seen worse. "At ten forty-two this morning, Miss Moreau enters the dressing room. At ten forty-four, the brooch leaves its box and goes into her clutch. At eleven fifty, Miss Moreau embraces Mrs. Vera at the front door, and her hand goes to the zipper of Mrs. Vera's bag."

"Lily," Damon said.

"It's not what it looks like!" Lily's voice cracked. "She's setting me up! Margaret, please—"

"You are in the video," Margaret said, in a voice that usually froze lakes.

Nobody moved. A cousin halfway down the table had stopped with her wine glass in the air.

I picked up the pen. "The divorce, then." I signed Vera Lockhart on the line. "Congratulations, Damon. I hope the two of you are very happy."

"You're not going to cry?" he said. "Beg?"

"I tried that." I pushed the folder back across the table. "It's not my style."

"Vera, wait—" Margaret started.

"Keep the house. Keep the money. Keep her."

Margaret stood so fast that her chair scraped the floor. "You ungrateful little—" She raised her hand.

I caught her wrist in the air.

"I wouldn't," I said quietly, so that only she could hear. "The butler's tablet still has that video, and it's one text away from your charity board."

Her hand dropped. Her face went white around the mouth.

"You called me a thief in front of your whole family," I said, louder. "You can apologize, or you can watch me leave."

She said nothing. I picked up my handbag and walked out.

In the hallway, a maid pressed a folded umbrella into my hand. "Madam," she whispered. "It's raining."

"Thank you," I said. I meant it more than she knew.

On the driveway, a text from Damon's bank was waiting on Vera's phone. Card ending 4417 has been closed at the request of the primary holder. The banking app showed a balance of $2.37.

Pale text appeared in the air in front of me, right there in the rain.

SURVIVAL RATE: 0.03% → 0.4%

And under it:

PANTRY UNLOCKED. Time stands still inside. Anything you touch goes in.

"Okay," I said to the empty driveway. "In."

I touched the granola bar in my bag, and it vanished.

"Out."

It was back in my hand, crinkly and cold.

I laughed until I had to hold on to the gate. I had told the internet I'd let every last one of those idiots starve, and the universe had handed me a pantry and two dollars.

Two dollars.

I stopped laughing.

"Chapter five," I said out loud. "Chapter forty. Chapter one hundred and two."

The author uses the same six lottery numbers in all three of those chapters: seven, fourteen, twenty-two, thirty-one, thirty-eight, forty. Tonight, October 17th, they appear on a news ticker in the Lockhart kitchen, with a jackpot of $1.4 million. Nobody in the book ever claims it.

A ticket cost two dollars. Sales closed at seven, and it was 4:10.

"Run," I told myself, and ran for the bus.

Twelve days.