Prologue
A woman stands barefoot in her kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday, repairing the clasp of an old silver locket, when someone knocks at her door. The letter arrives three years after the accident, written in the hand of a man everyone believes is dead. It tells her she was the reason he disappeared. It tells her to remember what happened.
Everyone in these pages will lie to you. Some of the doors in this story lead nowhere. One leads to the truth, and the truth is not a room anyone can live in. It is a corridor you walk again and again, carrying a lamp, learning which walls are real.
If you are looking for an innocent woman, you will not find her here.
If you are looking for a monster, you will find several, and then you will find that each of them was also once a child in a burning house, making a choice that someone else would spend decades renaming.0
