The Second Vow

Josephine's POV My hand found my collarbone before my eyes opened all the way. No wound. No blood. Just skin, warm from sleep, and a pulse going faster than a quiet room like this had any right to cause. I sat up. The ceiling was wrong. Not wrong exactly. Older. There was a crack near the window I hadn't looked at in years, the one my father promised to fix when I was twelve and never did. My childhood room. Vivienne's voice was still finishing in my ear, the way a song keeps playing after you turn off the radio. Now that he has full control, you're no use to me anymore. The rest of the sentence didn't come. I reached for it the way you reach for a word on the tip of your tongue, and it slid back into the dark before my hand closed around it. Three days. I said it out loud, to nobody, just to hear it exist outside my own skull. "Three days." The wedding dress hung off the back of my door, white and patient, the way it had waited the first time too. I remembered every hour of the week that followed it. I remembered the color of Griffin's tie at the altar, gray tipping into blue depending on the light. I did not remember what day he proposed. I reached for it anyway. Tuesday. He'd stood right here and asked, and I said yes before he finished the question. It was a Tuesday. Wasn't it a Tuesday. The memory sat softer at the edges than it had an hour ago, like a photograph left too long in a window. An hour ago I would have sworn to it in front of the whole pack council. Now I couldn't, and that not being able to scare me more than the dress did. Someone knocked twice and didn't wait for an answer. "Fitting in an hour, and Aunt Carol wants the sleeves taken in again, don't ask me why, I already told her they're fine." Priya crossed the room with three pins between her teeth, eyes on the dress, not on me. "You're up early." "Couldn't sleep." "Bride nerves." She held the dress against my shoulders and made a face at it like it had personally wronged her. "Normal. My mother threw up on her wedding day. Actual vomit. Actual bush. In front of actual guests." "That's comforting." "Wasn't trying to comfort you." A pin went into the seam near my wrist. "Was trying to make you laugh. Did it work?" "A little." It hadn't. Not really. But she looked pleased enough that I let her have it. She turned the dress toward the light, checking the hem, and I watched her hands instead of the fabric. Steady hands. Sure of every stitch. I had a memory of those same hands at my funeral, except there was no funeral, because nobody in this life knew I had died yet, including me an hour ago. "You're doing the thing," Priya said. "What thing?" "The starting thing. Where you go somewhere else behind your eyes and I have to say your name twice." She didn't look up. "Josephine." "Sorry." "Don't apologize, just tell me what's wrong." I opened my mouth to say I never said anything was. "You didn't have to," she said, not unkindly. "It's on your whole face." I sat on the edge of the bed and let her think it was nerves, because nerves was survivable and the truth was not a sentence I had words for yet. An ache sat under my ribs, just left of center, in a spot that had no business hurting at all. I pressed two fingers there without meaning to. "I keep thinking about the wedding," I said, which was true in the way half a truth is still true. "Good thoughts or bad thoughts?" Both. That was the honest answer. I wanted to stand at that altar again more than I wanted almost anything, and some sick, stubborn part of me wanted the whole week to happen exactly the way it happened the first time, right up until the part where it killed me. I hated that part of myself. I hated it and I couldn't make it stop wanting. "Good thoughts," I said. "Mostly." Priya's eyes came up at that, quick, assessing, the way she checked a border patrol line for anything out of place. Whatever she saw, she let it go. That was the thing about Priya. She noticed everything and only pushed on half of it. "Carol's going to want you downstairs in twenty minutes," she said. "I'd fake being asleep if I were you, buy yourself ten more." "You're a terrible influence." "I'm your best friend. It's the same job." She kissed the top of my head on her way past, quick, easy, the kind of gesture that meant more than either of us said out loud. "Twenty minutes, Jo." The door clicked shut behind her. I sat with the dress a long moment after that, tracing the beadwork along the bodice with one finger, feeling the small ridges of it under my nail. There was a loose thread near the left seam nobody had caught yet. I filed that away for no reason at all, the way you notice things that don't matter when the things that do matter are too big to look at directly. I lifted the dress off the door to check the length against the mirror, and that was when the tissue paper in the box beneath it shifted wrong. Too much give on one side. I dug through it. A single folded note sat at the bottom, tucked where no hand but mine would ever go looking. No envelope. No name on the outside. My fingers were not steady when I opened it, and I told myself that the pins from the fitting were still catching at my nerves, though I already knew it wasn't. One line, in handwriting I didn't recognize. I know what you saw before you died. I read it twice to make sure the words weren't rearranging themselves the way the rest of my memory had started to. They didn't. They sat there on the page, plain and certain, in ink that hadn't so much as smudged. Someone in this life already knew what I was.