Chapter 24:

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Because here is what I’d come to understand, sitting on my own headstone, watching the ocean, watching two men bleed for me and neither of them bleed enough: Dominic hadn’t done anything wrong. Not in the way villains do wrong—with intent, with malice, with the conscious decision to cause harm. What Dominic had done was simpler and, in some ways, worse. He had failed to love me. That was his entire crime. He had stood in the same room as love, worn its clothing, spoken its lines, performed its rituals—and never once let it in. He had been a tourist in our marriage, visiting on weekends, taking photographs, leaving no trace.

I didn’t have enough reason to hate him. Hate requires a certain respect—an acknowledgment that the other person had power over you, that what they did mattered. And I was past that now. Past the hate, past the love, past the wanting, past the needing. What I felt for Dominic Ashworth was the vast, unbothered calm of a woman who has finally stopped knocking on a door that was never going to open.

Dominic smiled. Not the relief smile from moments ago—this one was bitter, broken at the edges, the smile of a man receiving an answer he already knew but hoped to hear differently.

“But I’d rather you hate me,” he said, and his voice was barely a voice now—more of a vibration, a frequency, a signal fading into static, “than not care at all.”

Of course he would. Of course. Because hatred is a form of attention, and attention was the only currency Dominic had ever understood. Love, hatred, jealousy, rage—they were all acceptable, all flattering, all proof that he occupied space in someone’s heart. But indifference? Indifference was the one thing his ego couldn’t survive. Not being hated. Not being loved. Simply not being considered.

His eyes closed. The movement was slow, involuntary, the way eyelids close when sleep arrives or when the body has decided, without consulting its owner, that it’s time. His breathing thinned to a whisper, then to a suggestion, then to nothing at all. The blood stopped pulsing from his wrist—not because the wound had closed, but because there was nothing left to pump.

Dominic Ashworth died in a grave he’d dug for himself, beside the ashes of a wife he’d never deserved, under a sky full of stars that didn’t care.

I looked at him for a long time. At the face I’d kissed a thousand times. At the hands that had held mine and Celeste’s and, in the end, a knife. At the body that was already beginning its slow negotiation with the earth, returning to the dirt the way all borrowed things eventually return to their owners.

Y𝗈𝘂𝘳 𝗻e𝘅𝗍 𝘧𝗮𝗏𝘰r𝗶𝗍e 𝗿еа𝘥 𝗂𝘴 𝗼ո 𝗴а𝗹𝗇𝘰𝘃𝖾𝗅𝘀.c𝘰m

And I said the last thing I would ever say to Dominic Ashworth:

“If there’s a next life, I hope we never meet again.”

It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t kind. It was the quiet, settled wish of a woman who had finally learned the difference between love and habit, between devotion and damage, between a home and a house where someone leaves the lights off.

My spirit was transparent now. I could see the stars through my own hands—or rather, through the memory of my hands, the impression they’d left on the air. I was almost gone. The edges of me were dissolving into the night the way sugar dissolves into warm water: completely, irreversibly, without residue.

And then—a light.

Not the moonlight. Not the stars. Something else entirely. A warmth that began at the center of my chest—or where my chest had been—and radiated outward, filling me the way dawn fills a room: gradually, then all at once, then everywhere. It was the first warmth I’d felt since dying, and it was so overwhelming, so thoroughly good, that I understood immediately it wasn’t coming from this world.

I walked toward it. Not because I chose to—because my soul recognized it the way a body recognizes sleep after days of wakefulness. Instinctively. Gratefully. Without resistance.

Within the light, there was a mirror. Or something like a mirror—a surface that reflected not my face but something deeper, something true, the version of reality that exists beneath the version we agree to see.

And in that mirror, I saw Jasper.

He was kneeling. Not in the cemetery, not in the apartment, not in any place I’d seen him since my death. He was in a church—small, quiet, lit by candles that threw trembling shadows across wooden pews. Before him hung an image of Jesus, and Jasper’s hands were clasped so tightly his knuckles had gone white, and his eyes were closed with the particular intensity of someone who is not performing prayer but performing surgery with it—cutting through the noise of the world to reach whatever lives on the other side of silence.

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