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.

Amira Osborne POV:

I did not weep. I did not cry out. I merely raised a hand to my throbbing cheek and regarded him, my eyes as vacant and still as a winter pond.

“You are right, Carter,” I said, my voice unnervingly level. “That was a very brave thing to do.”

My composure, the sheer absence of hysterics, seemed to disquiet him more than any outburst. He appeared to perceive, for the first time, the immense and silent distance that now separated us—a void across which my voice, my very self, could no longer travel to reach him.

He reached for my hand, his voice attempting a softer register. “Amira, listen… I am sorry. These affairs have been stressful. Let us simply endure this. We shall go and select your wedding gown tomorrow, precisely as we planned.”

I stared at a point just past his shoulder, my gaze unfocused. The wedding gown. It felt an entire lifetime ago that I had cared for such frivolities. From the instant he had proposed, from the moment I had consented to set my own aspirations aside for his, the whole enterprise had been a profound and ruinous error.

He must have sensed he was losing his hold, for he did something unprecedented. He turned to Francine, his tone uncharacteristically firm. “Francine, I believe it is best you return home. Amira and I require a interval of privacy.”

He spent the remainder of the day by my side, a perfect facsimile of a grieving, supportive fiancé. He even knelt with me before my mother’s empty memorial niche until late into the night. It was a masterful performance, but it was too little, too late.

When we finally returned to the apartment, she was there, waiting for us. Francine was huddled by our front door, wrapped in a thin blanket, shivering and affecting a look of utter terror.

She threw herself into Carter’s arms. “Carter! I was so frightened! I kept hearing noises… I think… I think it was Edie’s ghost. She is angry with me!”

He attempted to gently disengage himself, glancing nervously at me. “Francine, do not be ridiculous.”

She turned to me, her eyes wide and pleading. “Amira, you believe me, do you not? You must understand, I feel such a weight of guilt.”

A short, brittle laugh escaped me. “Oh, I am certain my mother’s spirit is near. But she would not squander her energies on you. She would be seeking out the persons who are truly responsible for her death.”

Francine’s face crumpled. She burst into loud, theatrical sobs. “I cannot remain here! I shall have a breakdown! I shall… I shall throw myself from the balcony!”

That was all it took. Carter’s resolve crumbled. He whirled on me, his eyes blazing with fury. “Why must you be so cruel? So selfish? She is distraught, and all you can do is mock her! At times I wonder why I ever imagined I could spend my life with someone so heartless.”

The argument drew the neighbors from their apartments. They stood in their doorways, watching, listening. Francine, ever the actress, played to the gallery, sobbing about how she was but a lonely widow who saw Carter as a son, and how I was a jealous, vindictive shrew.

The neighbors, of course, took her side. I heard the whispers. “Poor woman.” “That Amira is so cold.” “This is naught but petty jealousy.”

Carter did not defend me. Not once.

He simply wrapped his arm around Francine and led her inside our apartment, shutting the door firmly in my face.