Chapter 22:

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“Well said. You should have been the one to die.”

The sentence landed like a headstone. No one spoke after it. There was nothing left to say.

Jasper stood—slowly, painfully, one hand braced against his knee—and brushed the dirt from his clothes with the mechanical precision of a man putting himself back together one gesture at a time. Before he turned to leave, he looked down at Dominic with an expression that had traveled beyond anger into something colder and more final.

“Repair her grave,” he said. Not a request. A sentencing. “Every stone. Every letter. If I come back and it’s not exactly as it was, I will use every connection I have to dismantle the Ashworth family. Not out of revenge. Out of principle. Because you don’t get to break things and walk away. Not anymore.”

Then Jasper left. His footsteps faded down the gravel path, and the cemetery absorbed his absence the way it absorbed everything: silently, completely, without complaint.

Dominic didn’t move. He lay on the ground for a long time—so long that the stars shifted overhead in their slow, indifferent rotation, so long that the night breeze changed direction twice and the ocean’s whisper cycled through several moods. The wind lifted the hair from his forehead, pushing it back from his face in a gesture so gentle it felt like a hand.

And suddenly I was somewhere else.

Not physically—ghosts don’t travel, exactly. We just remember so hard that the present dissolves and the past takes its place. I was in a field. A campsite. A night two years into our marriage, before Celeste, before the courthouse, before the world divided into before and after. The stars that night were brighter than tonight—impossibly bright, almost noisy in their brilliance, as though they were all trying to outshine each other for an audience of two people in a borrowed tent.

Dominic had been lying exactly like this—flat on his back, hair blown by the breeze, eyes reflecting the sky. We’d been talking about nothing. The kind of conversation that only happens when you’re completely comfortable with someone: half-sentences, shared silences, laughter that doesn’t need a punchline.

And then, out of nowhere—the way he did everything, without preamble, without warning, as though important words were allergic to preparation—he’d turned his head toward me and said:

“Maren, do you want to be my wife?”

𝖳𝗵𝘰𝘶𝗌𝘢ո𝗱𝗌 оf 𝗿𝖾𝘢𝖽ers o𝗇 𝗴alոo𝗏е𝘭ѕ.cо𝘮

Not will you marry me. Not a rehearsed speech with a ring and a bent knee. Just a question, asked under a sky full of stars, by a man who—for that one moment, that one irreducible, unrepeatable moment—might actually have meant it.

From liking to love, and from love to hate. Five years. The entire arc of a human heart, compressed into the time it takes to finish a degree or pay off a used car. It was too fast. Everything about us had been too fast—the meeting, the marriage, the destruction. As though our entire story had been written in shorthand by someone who was running out of pages.

The memory released me, and I was back in the cemetery. The night was the same. The stars were the same. Dominic was the same—lying in the dirt, staring upward, broken in ways that wouldn’t show on an X-ray.

Then he moved.

He stood up with a suddenness that startled me—not the slow, defeated rising of a man who’s given up, but the sharp, decisive movement of someone who has made a decision. His eyes had changed. The aimlessness was gone, replaced by something focused, something that looked almost like peace, which should have alarmed me more than it did.

He bit his finger. Hard enough to draw blood—bright, immediate, startling against the pale skin. And with that blood, he wrote on the fallen headstone. The letters were uneven, trembling, written by a hand that was already beginning to let go of the world:

Dominic Ashworth and Maren Holloway. Grave of husband and wife.

I stared at the words. The blood glistened in the moonlight, dark and wet and temporary—because blood dries, and rain falls, and time erases everything written by hands that are no longer alive to rewrite it. It was the most romantic and the most futile thing Dominic had ever done. A love letter to a dead woman, written in a language that would be illegible by morning.

Then Dominic lowered himself into the hole he’d dug with his own hands—the grave he’d opened to steal my ashes, the wound in the earth that was now, through a logic only the desperate can follow, his resting place too. He sat at the bottom, legs stretched out, back against the dirt wall, and he smiled.

It was the first real smile I’d seen on his face in months. Maybe years. Not the constructed, architectural smiles he’d given me during our marriage. Not the soft, involuntary ones he’d reserved for Celeste. This was something else—a smile of relief. The expression of a man who has been carrying something impossibly heavy for an impossibly long time and has finally, finally, set it down.

He reached into his coat pocket and took out a knife.

The blade caught the moonlight as he pressed it against the inside of his wrist, and my soul—what was left of it, thin and transparent and barely tethered to the world—lurched forward.

He cut.

.

.

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