PROLOGUE
Ashes Between Us
There was a time before the lies. Before the blood, the silence, the ash.
They were young then—brilliant, reckless, in love with each other and the world they thought they could bend. Catherine with her soft hands and scalpel mind. Luca with his courtroom charm and eyes that never blinked when they should have. They loved like it was war. And maybe it always was.
In another life, they might have been saved. If the boy had lived. If the secrets had stayed buried. If grief hadn’t hollowed them out and filled them with something colder.
But some sins don’t wash clean. Some names are written in bone, not ink. And once the first lie is told, it echoes through everything after.
This is not the story of a marriage falling apart.
It is the story of what they were willing to become—for love, for survival, for the boy who was never supposed to die.
And it begins, as all tragedies do, with silence.
