I Don't
The last thing I heard was my husband's voice.
"Tell them she was drinking."
I was lying at the bottom of the stairs in our townhouse on Sutton Place. The marble was cold against my cheek. I couldn't move my legs. I couldn't feel my hands. There was something warm spreading under my head, and I knew, in the distant calm way you know things at the end, that it was my own blood.
"She wasn't drinking," said Celeste. My stepsister. Her voice was high and frightened, coming from somewhere above me, at the top of the stairs. "Graham, she wasn't — the police will check—"
"Then pour some on her," said Graham. "There's a bottle of Meursault in the kitchen. Splash it on her dress. On the floor. Tell them she'd been drinking since lunch and she was upset about the board meeting and she tripped on her heel." His footsteps came down the stairs. Unhurried. The same careful steps he took into every room. "She's been unstable for years. Everybody knows that. Dr. Marsh will say so."
"She's still breathing."
"Not for long." His shoes stopped beside my head. Italian leather. I'd bought them for him. "Go get the wine, Celeste."
I tried to say something. I don't know what. I know about the money. I know about Papa. I know about the oleander. I'd known for three days. I'd come home tonight with the proof in my handbag, and I'd said it to his face at the top of the stairs, and he'd smiled, and put his hand flat between my shoulder blades, and pushed.
The light was going gray at the edges.
The last thing I saw was the hem of Celeste's lavender dress going past my face toward the kitchen.
The last thing I thought was: I should have said no.
Then there was music.
Organ music. Huge, rolling, filling the whole world, so loud it shook the air in my chest. Light — colored light — falling across my hands in long slanting bars of red and blue and gold. The smell of lilies. Hundreds of lilies. And beeswax, and old stone, and somebody's perfume, Shalimar, too much of it.
I was standing up.
I looked down at my hands. They were holding a bouquet. White peonies and lily of the valley, tied with silk ribbon. My hands were perfectly steady. On the inside of my left wrist, the faint little cluster of old burn marks I'd had since I was nine, from my grandmother's lab. On my left hand, an engagement ring. A three-carat oval diamond in a platinum halo setting. I'd thrown it into the East River in 2029.
I was wearing it.
"—and do you, Ava Odile Sinclair," said a voice in front of me, "take this man—"
I looked up.
A priest. Old, kind-faced, in white and gold vestments. Father Delaney. He'd baptized me. He'd buried my father.
Behind him: the great gold mosaic dome of St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue. Byzantine saints in gold and blue looking down from the apse. Candles on the altar. White flowers everywhere.
And beside me, at the altar, in a dove-gray morning suit with a white rose in his lapel, with his sandy hair combed just so and his blue eyes warm and his perfect teeth showing in a perfect smile, holding out his hand for mine—
Graham.
I couldn't breathe.
He was young. That was the first thing. He was young. No gray at the temples. No little line between his eyebrows from five years of lying. He was thirty-three, and handsome, and glowing, the way he'd glowed at our wedding, the way he'd glowed in every photograph my father had framed and put on his desk at Maison Sinclair until the day he died.
My father.
I turned my head.
In the first pew on the left, in a gray morning suit, with a white rose in his lapel and his silver hair combed and his reading glasses on their cord around his neck — Henry Sinclair. Sixty-one. Alive. Pink-cheeked and tearful and smiling at me, holding a handkerchief.
In my first life, he'd been dead for four years.
I'd held his hand in a hospital bed in April 2027 while his heart slowed down and down and down and finally stopped, and he'd said, The lights look yellow, Ava. Why are the lights yellow? And nobody had known why. And I hadn't known why for three more years.
He was alive.
He was alive.
Beside him: Margot. My stepmother. Silver-blonde bob, an Hermès scarf, the face of a woman who'd been photographed for French Vogue at twenty and had never quite forgiven the world for letting her age.
And behind me — I didn't have to look; I could smell her, lavender and vanilla and something sweet, the same scent she'd worn since she was sixteen — my maid of honor. Celeste.
"Ava?" said Father Delaney gently. "Darling? Do you take this man?"
A ripple of soft laughter went through the church. Four hundred guests. Nervous-bride laughter. Look at her, she's overwhelmed.
I looked down at the program in the pew beside the altar.
The Marriage of Ava Odile Sinclair and Graham Whitmore Pierce. Saturday, the Sixteenth of May, Two Thousand Twenty-Six.
May 16, 2026.
I'd died on May 9, 2031.
Five years. I had five years back. I had my father back. I had the company and the fields in Grasse and my grandmother's archive and my own name — everything they'd taken — all of it still here, still mine, still whole.
I was standing at the exact moment it had all begun.
"Ava," said Graham, very softly, so only I could hear. Still smiling. His hand still held out. "Sweetheart. Everyone's waiting."
I looked at his hand. At the palm I'd felt flat between my shoulder blades at the top of the stairs.
I thought about the Meursault.
Splash it on her dress.
"No," I said.
It wasn't loud. I didn't shout it. But St. Bartholomew's has the best acoustics in New York; my grandmother used to say so. The word went up into the gold dome and came back down over four hundred heads like a dropped glass.
Father Delaney blinked. "I'm sorry, my dear?"
"No," I said again. "I don't. I don't take him. I'm not marrying him."
The church went absolutely silent.
Then — all at once — it wasn't silent at all. A gasp, from four hundred throats. Somebody in the back said "What?" A woman laughed shrilly and stopped. The organist, who'd been holding a soft chord, lifted his hands off the keys and the chord just — stopped, hanging in the air.
Graham's smile didn't move. His hand didn't move. But his eyes — I'd learned to read his eyes over five years, the way you learn to read weather — went flat and cold as a frozen pond.
"Ava," he said, very quietly. "You're nervous. It's all right. Take a breath."
"I'm not nervous."
"You're having a panic attack. You haven't been sleeping. I told your father." He stepped closer. Still smiling. Still gentle. For the cameras. For the four hundred. "Let's just finish this, sweetheart, and then we'll get you somewhere quiet."
We'll get you somewhere quiet. He'd said it in my first life too. Not at the wedding. Later. In 2029, when he'd started telling people I was unstable. When Dr. Marsh started bringing me pills.
Behind me, Celeste said, "Ava, honey—" in her soft breathy voice, and put her hand on my arm.
I looked down at her hand. Pale. Pink nails. A small silver ring with a moonstone.
I knew where those hands had been. I knew what they'd brewed, every night, for a year, in the kitchen at Sutton Place. Papa's special chamomile.
I took her hand off my arm. Gently. The way you'd remove something from a sleeve.
Then I turned around.
I don't know what I was looking for. Not consciously. I just turned and looked out over the church — over four hundred faces gaping up at me, over the lilies and the candles and the long red aisle stretching all the way back to the great bronze doors on Park Avenue.
And I found him.
The very last pew. On the aisle. Alone.
A man in black. Not morning dress. Black suit, black cashmere turtleneck, as if he'd come to a funeral instead of a wedding. Black hair, a little too long, falling over his forehead. A hard, pale, elegant face. And under him, instead of the pew, a wheelchair. Matte black. Very plain.
He wasn't gaping like the others. He was perfectly still. His hands were folded in his lap. And he was looking at me — straight down the length of St. Bartholomew's — with eyes so pale a gray they looked silver in the candlelight.
Lucas Thorne.
I knew who he was. Everyone in New York knew who he was. The CEO of Thorne & Co., the luxury house my father's company had competed with for forty years. The man the papers called the Ice King before his accident, and the Broken King after. Eight months ago, his Porsche's brakes had failed on the Saw Mill River Parkway at seventy miles an hour. The doctors said he might never walk again.
My father had invited him to the wedding because Lucas's mother had been a friend. I'd forgotten that. In my first life, I'd never noticed him there.
But I knew him.
I knew him because I'd seen him once before. After.
I don't know how to explain the after. I've never tried. I don't know if it was real.
After the stairs. After the gray at the edges. There was a long darkness, and then — for a little while — there was something like a dream. I was cold. I was standing in the rain in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, in front of a new stone with my name on it. AVA SINCLAIR PIERCE. 2000–2031. Beloved Wife.
Graham hadn't come. Celeste hadn't come. Margot hadn't come. The funeral had been the day before, small, quick, a private family matter, and they'd all gone home to divide what was left.
The only person standing at my grave in the rain was a man in a black wheelchair.
He'd come alone. No umbrella. His black hair plastered to his forehead. He'd sat there in front of my stone for a long time, not moving, with the rain running down his face. And then he'd said something. Very quietly. I couldn't hear it. I was too far away, and getting farther.
And then — this was the part I was least sure of — there'd been other moments. Flickers. Newspaper headlines in a dream. Thorne & Co. Acquires Maison Sinclair in Hostile Takeover. CFO Graham Pierce Indicted for Fraud. Sinclair Heir's Death Reopened. A courtroom. A man in a black wheelchair at the back of it, watching Graham in handcuffs.
He'd taken them apart. For me. After I was dead.
And I'd never once, in my whole first life, said more than ten words to him.
I walked down the aisle.
In my wedding dress. With my bouquet of peonies and lily of the valley. Past four hundred staring faces. Past the ninth pew, where Graham's mother had both hands over her mouth. Past the fifteenth, where my old friend Sasha from Pratt was standing up on the kneeler to see, her eyes enormous. Past the twentieth, the thirtieth. The whole long red aisle of St. Bartholomew's, with the organ silent and the gold saints watching from the dome and my train whispering on the carpet behind me.
Behind me, I heard Graham say "Ava," sharp now, not gentle. I heard my father say "Ava, sweetheart—?" bewildered. I heard Margot hiss something to Celeste.
I didn't stop.
I stopped at the last pew. In front of the man in the black wheelchair.
He looked up at me. Up close, his eyes weren't silver. They were the palest gray I'd ever seen, like winter light through ice, with a darker ring around the edge. There was a faint white scar running from his left temple up into his black hair. He smelled — I couldn't help noticing; I notice everything by smell — of vetiver, and cold air, and something underneath it, very faint, that I couldn't place. Something green. Something like jasmine at dawn.
He didn't say anything. He just looked at me.
The whole church was holding its breath.
"Mr. Thorne," I said.
My voice was steady. I was proud of that, later.
"Will you marry me?" I said. "Today?"
