Chapter 1
For four years, I had looked at my wife’s portrait and believed the woman inside it was dead.
Now a living woman sat at the end of the passage behind that portrait wearing Sofia’s wedding bracelet.
I could not move.
The corridor was narrow and dim, but I knew that bracelet. I had commissioned it myself before our wedding, one of two matching pieces engraved on the inside with a sentence nobody else had ever seen.
The woman lifted her face.
She was thinner than Sofia had been. Older around the eyes. Her hair fell unevenly across her shoulders, and fear had changed the way she held herself.
But then she looked at me.
“Vincent?”
My entire body went cold.
Nobody had said my name that way in four years.
Behind me, Helena whispered, “Don’t.”
I turned my head.
My sister was backing toward the memorial room door.
Marco stood beside the shattered remains of his glass, completely pale.
That was when I knew I was not imagining anything.
I stepped into the passage.
The woman tried to stand and nearly fell. I reached her before she hit the wall.
Her fingers closed around my sleeve.
I looked down at the bracelet.
Then at her face.
“Sofia?”
She started crying.
Not loudly.
The kind of crying that happens when someone has waited too long for a moment and stopped believing it would ever arrive.
“You finally heard me.”
I stared.
Behind us, Clara’s small voice came through the open panel.
“Daddy?”
Sofia froze.
Her entire expression changed.
“Clara?”
My throat closed.
She knew.
Before I could answer, Sofia gripped my wrist.
“Don’t let Helena take her.”
I slowly looked back toward my sister.
Helena had stopped retreating.
Marco had too.
Both were watching Sofia as if a dead woman had just walked into the room and named them.
May you like
And I understood something worse than the hidden passage.
They had always known she was alive.
