chapter 1
NAOMI POV
CHAPTER 1
I was dying. I knew that much clearly, even as everything else went strange and slow around me.
I heard my mother-in-law's voice out in the hallway, talking to someone. "It's for the best," she said. I wanted to ask her what "it" was. I never got the chance. The heart monitor beside my bed was beeping steady, then slower, then one long flat tone and then nothing. No light. No floating feeling. Just quiet, the kind I didn't know a person could actually disappear into.
That was the end. I was sure of it.
Then, impossibly, I opened my eyes again.
I was looking at a wedding dress.
The same one. The one I'd already worn to marry Julian Voss, a year from now, in the life that had just ended. It was hanging on the back of a door I recognized instantly, still zipped in its garment bag, waiting.
For a second I thought I was dreaming the kind of dream where your brain replays the worst day of your life and won't let you wake up from it. But it didn't feel like a dream. I could feel the weight of the duvet under my hands. I could smell the candle someone had lit on the dresser. When I reached for my phone on the nightstand, the screen lit up with today's date, and that's when I understood I wasn't dreaming, and I wasn't remembering. I was actually here again.
It was my wedding day. The first one. Four hours before I would marry Julian Voss for the very first time except I already knew everything that came after.
I sat up too fast and my head spun. I pressed both hands flat against my chest, right over the place where, a year from now, my heart was going to stop for good. It was still beating. Fast, but beating. I counted it out loud one, two, three the way my father used to make me do as a kid, when panic hit faster than I could think through it.
I had a whole year to think through now, all of it arriving at once. The woman with dark hair, whose laugh I'd heard twice through a door I wasn't supposed to be behind, though I didn't know her name yet. The hospital room, and the careful way the doctor had spoken to me, like a man who already knew he'd never have to answer a follow-up question. My mother-in-law's voice again, already rehearsing what she'd tell people.
I made myself get up. My legs held, which surprised me.
Someone knocked on the door three short raps I would have known anywhere. Mia. My best friend, my maid of honor, the person who had fixed my hair before every important day of my life since we were nineteen.
"Are you decent?" Mia called through the door.
"Depends what you're about to say," I called back.
There was a pause on the other side, longer than it should have been.
"...I was going to say I brought coffee, because the bakery messed up your order," Mia said. "Why do you sound like that?"
I opened the door. There she was, holding the same box I remembered from the last time this morning happened, wearing the same slightly offended look at being guessed right.
"Lucky guess," I said, and took the box before she could ask again.
"You're being weird," she said, pushing past me into the room. "Weird-weird. Not normal-wedding-day weird."
"I'm fine."
"You didn't even fight me on the earrings."
"I looked at them."
"You always fight me on jewelry. That's your whole thing." She stopped digging through the garment bag and actually looked at me. "Okay. What's going on?"
"Nothing's going on. I'm getting married in four hours."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got right now."
"Did you even sleep?"
"Not really."
"Same, honestly. I was up till three doing your seating chart, because you never sent me the final version."
"I sent it Tuesday."
"You sent me a version with Aunt Carol at two different tables."
"That was on purpose. She hates both of those people equally. It evens out."
"That's an insane way to plan a wedding."
"It's working so far."
"Barely." She held out the earrings without making a thing of it, and I took them. My hands were steadier than they had any right to be.
They were the ones Edmund had given me himself, the night of the rehearsal dinner. Something borrowed doesn't have to just be your mother's, he'd said, like it meant nothing.
Mia zipped the dress up the back and stepped away so I could look in the mirror. For one second, I looked like a woman who had no idea what was coming.
I knew things that version of me wasn't supposed to know yet. That eleven months from now, a doctor whose name I never learned would walk into a hospital room and make sure I didn't walk back out of it. That a woman named Vivienne would be pregnant by then. That everyone in this family would decide, that I deserve to die. People get divorced every day. Nobody has to die for it.
I still didn't have an answer for why they'd decided I did.
Down the hall, a door opened, and I heard Julian before I saw him laughing at something one of his groomsmen said, easy and unguarded in a way I hadn't let myself remember in a year.
I picked up the rings. Put mine on.
Then I walked toward the door.
