Amira Osborne POV:

I drew back as if from a serpent. “I cannot. I am allergic to alcohol.”

It was the truth. A severe, dangerous allergy. A single mouthful could close my throat. Carter knew this better than any living soul.

Francine’s face contorted into a mask of theatrical dismay. “Oh, dear. Am I making you uncomfortable again? Perhaps I should simply depart,” she sniffled, turning to Carter with wide, beseeching eyes.

The affable host vanished from his face, replaced by something hard and unyielding. The eyes of his parents, my mother, and their guests were all upon us. “Amira, do not make a scene,” he gritted out, his voice a low growl meant only for my ears. “Just drink it.”

A memory surfaced, sharp and bitter. Years ago, at some collegiate gathering, a drunken boy had tried to force a cup of beer into my hand. Carter had struck him, a single, decisive blow, his voice ringing with a righteous fury. “She said no. Are you deaf?” He had held me for the remainder of the night, whispering that he would never allow anyone to harm me.

The irony was a physical pang in my chest.

With a trembling hand, I took the flute from Francine. I closed my eyes, held the image of my mother’s smiling face in my mind, and drained the effervescent liquid in one swallow. The taste was acidic, a harbinger of the poison now coursing through me.

It required less than five minutes. First, an unbearable itching, then the angry red welts that bloomed across my skin. My throat began to constrict, my breath catching in ragged, shallow rasps.

Panic flared in my eyes, but I could not call for a physician. I could not risk my mother seeing me in such a state, could not risk the shock to her delicate heart.

Carter, seeing the severity of my reaction, finally acted. He swept me into his arms and carried me out to his motorcar, his face a mask of strained concern.

As he sped toward the hospital, he offered no apology. He offered a defense of her. “Francine did not know, Amira. She feels dreadful about it. She is simply a very direct person, she means no harm.”

I lay slumped against the passenger door, too enfeebled to argue, the sound of his voice an abrasive rasp against my raw nerves. I wanted to scream, to laugh at the sheer, grotesque absurdity of it all. Instead, a bitter silence filled the space between us.

At the hospital, they attached me to an intravenous drip. The antihistamines performed their function, and the suffocating pressure in my chest slowly receded. Exhausted, I fell into a fitful, shallow sleep.

I awoke in the dead of night to a sharp, stinging pain in the back of my hand. My eyes fluttered open. The room was dark, silent. Carter was gone. I looked at my IV line; a dark crimson tide was flowing back up the tube. The bag had run dry.

I fumbled for the nurse’s call button clipped to my pillow. I pressed it repeatedly, but no one came. A damp chill, born not of the room's temperature but of a primal fear, settled upon my skin. The button was broken.

With a groan, I forced my weak body from the bed, the metal IV stand rattling beside me. I had to find help. I stumbled to the door and pushed, but it refused to yield. Something was propped against it from the other side.

Panic, sharp and metallic, rose in my throat. I pounded on the door, my voice a hoarse croak. “Hello? Is anyone there? Help!”

My cries were answered not by a nurse, but by a sound from the adjacent room. A woman’s breathless moan, followed by a man’s low grunt.

The sounds were sickeningly familiar.

Carter. And Francine.

They were in the room next door. He had left me, with my own blood siphoning back into my veins and the call button broken, to be with her. He had barricaded me in.

I sank to the floor, my back against the unyielding door, and listened. I called for help throughout the night, my throat growing raw, my fists bruising against the wood. And throughout the night, the sounds from the next room continued, a grotesque and constant accompaniment to my desolation.

Just as the first grey light of dawn stained the window, the obstruction outside my door was moved. Carter entered, looking refreshed and sated, a smugness in his eyes that he did not bother to conceal.

Then he saw the dried blood on the back of my hand, the tear-stains on my face. The practiced mask of solicitude dropped into place over his features. “Amira! My God, what happened? Why did you not summon a nurse?”

I simply stared at him, my heart a dead, heavy stone in my chest. I no longer possessed the energy for anger, only a profound, hollowed-out emptiness.

As he leaned over me, feigning worry, I caught her scent upon him—the same expensive, cloying perfume of gardenia and musk that always announced her presence. The smell filled my lungs, and I wretched, turning my head to heave dryly onto the cold linoleum floor.

Ignoring my distress, he bustled about, calling for doctors, performing the part of the devoted fiancé with a nauseating perfection.

Just as a nurse arrived, my telephone, lying on the bedside table, began to ring. It was the property manager from my mother’s apartment building. His voice was strained with panic.

“Ms. Osborne? You must come at once. It is your mother. There has been an accident.”

Amira Osborne POV:

The world contracted to a tunnel of screaming sirens and frantic, incoherent prayers. I do not recall the drive, only the sensation of my own heart laboring to beat its way out of my ribs. I burst into my mother’s apartment to find a scene from my most profound nightmares.

She was on the floor, her face a ghastly, bloodless white, her breaths so shallow as to be nearly imperceptible.

“Mom!” The scream was torn from the very fabric of my soul. I fell to my knees beside her, my hands hovering, terrified to touch her, to cause more harm. I fumbled for my telephone, my fingers clumsy and slick with sweat, and dialed for an ambulance.

“Half an hour,” the dispatcher said. “It is rush hour, it is the best we can do.”

Half an hour. My mother did not possess half an hour.

Neighbors began to gather in the hallway, their faces pale in the dim light. “What happened?” I pleaded, my eyes scanning their expressions for an answer.

An elderly woman, Mrs. Gable from the adjacent apartment, shifted uncomfortably. “That… other woman was here,” she said, her voice low. “The one in the fine clothes. She was shouting at your mother about something. Then we heard a thud.”

A red haze swam before my eyes. Francine.

As if summoned by the thought, she appeared at the end of the hall, emerging from the elevator. She was clad in a slinky, wholly inappropriate silk robe, her hair a perfect sculpture. She did not look surprised; she looked merely observant, like a naturalist studying an insect.

“Oh, dear,” she said, her gaze flickering from my mother’s still form to me. “What a terrible shame. She seemed so agitated when she saw me emerging from Carter’s apartment this morning. I suppose the shock was simply too much for her constitution.”

The implication was a poisoned dart. She was blaming this on my mother herself.

Just then, Carter’s motorcar screeched to a halt outside. He ran into the building, his face a mask of worry until he saw Francine.

“Carter, help me,” I sobbed, grabbing his arm, clinging to him as my last earthly hope. “We must get her to the hospital. The ambulance is too far away.”

But Francine was already weaving her own narrative. “Carter, darling,” she cooed, her voice trembling. “It was dreadful. I believe someone was attempting to break into my apartment. I was so frightened.” She pointed a shaking finger up the stairs. “Would you mind just… coming up to check? For but a moment?”

He looked from Francine’s performance to my mother lying on the floor. I saw the cold calculation in his eyes, the weighing of one thing against another. His future against my mother’s life.

“Carter, please,” I begged, my voice breaking. “She is dying.”

He looked at me then, and the concern on his face curdled into a familiar, sharp-edged impatience. He shook my hand from his arm with a violent jerk. “For God’s sake, Amira, can you not see that Francine is terrified? The ambulance is on its way. Cease being so selfish.”

He turned his back on me, on my dying mother, and wrapped a comforting arm around Francine’s shoulders, guiding her toward the stairs.

As the elevator doors slid shut, Francine glanced over his shoulder. In the brief gleam of the polished brass, I saw her expression of concern melt away like wax, revealing the hard, satisfied countenance beneath. She met my gaze, and her lips curved into a slow, deliberate smile.

It was the cruelest thing I had ever witnessed.

The doctor’s words were like a length of thick, grey felt, stuffing my ears and deadening all other sound. The world continued to move, but I could no longer hear it; there was only a low, dull hum from within my own skull. I fell to my knees, the sound of my own desperate wails a distant, alien noise. I begged. I pleaded with the neighbors, with anyone who would listen. Finally, a kind man, a stranger, took pity. He helped me carry my mother to his car.

We reached the hospital, but we were too late.

The doctor’s final pronouncement was a formality. “I am sorry, Ms. Osborne. We did everything we were able. Had she arrived but ten minutes sooner… perhaps.”

Ten minutes.

Carter had chosen to investigate Francine’s imaginary intruder over the ten minutes that could have saved my mother.

I stood in the sterile white corridor, the doctor’s voice fading. I could not seem to draw a full breath. I watched them wheel her body away, concealed by a white sheet, and I could not bring myself to follow.

I stood there all night, leaning against a cold wall, as silent tears traced paths down my face. I felt not grief, not sadness, but a curious lightness, as if some vital organ had been surgically removed, leaving behind a sterile, hollow cavity.

As dawn broke, my telephone, which a nurse had kindly plugged in for me, lit up with a text message. It was from a number I did not recognize, but I knew the sender.

“Oops. Looks like your mommy couldn’t handle the competition. Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of Carter for you. ;)”

A sound I had never before produced tore itself from my throat—a raw, guttural cry of pure agony and rage. I hurled the telephone against the plaster wall. It did not shatter; it burst, the screen cracking into a spiderweb of glass, the case splitting open and disgorging its small, metallic entrails across the floor.

I slid down the wall and crumpled, and something took root in that hollow space inside me. A hard, patient thing with the weight and chill of granite.

Amira Osborne POV:

They appeared at my mother’s funeral.

Carter and Francine walked into the quiet, somber chapel as if they held every right to be there. Francine, in a ridiculously flamboyant black hat, had the audacity to approach me, her face arranged into a mask of sorrow.

“Amira, I am so, so sorry for your loss,” she murmured, placing a hand on my arm.

The touch felt like a hot brand. I recoiled, my voice dripping with ice. “I hope you die screaming, Francine.”

Her smile faltered for a second. Carter stepped forward, his face tight with disapproval. “Amira, that is enough. Have some class.”

“Class?” I laughed, a harsh, grating sound. “You wish to speak of class, after what you two have done?”

“Francine was just being her usual, blunt self. You are too sensitive,” he said, dismissing my pain with a wave of his hand.

“Get out,” I said, my voice low and shaking with a rage that vibrated through my entire body. “Both of you. Get out of my mother’s funeral.”

He had the nerve to look offended. “I am going nowhere. Edie was to be my mother-in-law. I have a right to be here.” He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a threatening whisper. “And if you continue to make a scene, I promise you, there will be no wedding to concern yourself with at all.”

My eyes burned. I was about to tell him I did not give a damn for the wedding, for him, for any of it. I was about to unleash the plan that had been forming in the back of my mind, the escape route Arjun had offered me.

But I never got the chance.

Francine let out a sudden, theatrical shriek. She stumbled backward, colliding with the small table that held my mother’s portrait and her urn.

Time seemed to thicken, to slow to a crawl. I watched in horror as the table tipped, as the urn containing my mother’s ashes tumbled through the air, as her smiling face in the photograph met the marble floor.

The urn did not shatter so much as burst, a soft, percussive sound like a clod of dry earth being struck. My mother’s ashes, a fine, pale grey dust, mingled with the shards of pottery and bloomed in a small, tragic cloud before settling on the cold, unforgiving stone.

A strangled cry escaped my lips. “Mom!”

I fell to my knees, scrambling to scoop up what was left of her, my fingers digging into the gritty dust, tears blurring my vision until the world was nothing but a smear of black and grey.

Francine just stood there, a hand pressed to her mouth in a mockery of shock. She did not move to help.

Carter, held back by Francine’s grip on his arm, did not move either. “Do not go near it, darling,” I heard her whisper to him. “It is bad luck.”

He listened to her. He actually listened.

Instead of helping me, he took the small brass basin used for burning memorial papers, strode over to the mess, and began sweeping my mother’s remains into it with a dustpan. Then, he walked out of the chapel and emptied the entire thing—ashes, pottery shards, and all—into the nearest public trash receptacle.

I watched him, my mind unable to process the sheer, methodical cruelty of the act. He moved with a kind of brisk efficiency, as if he were merely tidying up a minor spill.

My voice came out as a strangled whisper, filled with more venom than I knew I possessed. “You are nothing but her pathetic little dog.”

His head snapped toward me. And then he did something I never, ever thought him capable of.

He slapped me.

The heat of his palm had not yet registered on my cheek when the sound of it—a flat, ugly crack—reverberated through the chapel. The mourners’ faces blurred into indistinct ovals of shock. A high-pitched ringing began in my left ear, and I could taste the faint, coppery tang of blood on my tongue. The warmth he had left on my skin felt like a burn from ice, and I looked at him, at this man I had once believed would protect me, and for the first time, I understood that the most grievous weapons are often held in the hands of those we have loved.

He had a moment of panic, of regret in his eyes, but it was swiftly extinguished by a cold defensiveness. “There were embers in the basin,” he said, his voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “It could have started a fire. I was protecting everyone.”

In that moment, I saw with a terrible, final clarity. There was nothing left to save.