Olivia measured the quiet between each step as precisely as if she were weighing flour—no slack, each movement slow and deliberate, because she knew one wrong footfall would echo in her bones for days. She padded across the kitchen’s tile in her socks, tea cooling in its mug beside the spread-out morning paper and her freshly wiped phone. From the hallway drifted the half-muted laughter of the twins, already squabbling over the last Pop-Tart, and Olivia catalogued the sound with distant relief. No tears, no frantic calls for her help—just the rich, undecipherable language of childhood she’d studied but never spoken.
He remembered that sound.
Too clearly.
It had never belonged to her.
It had belonged to them. Him and Ethan.
The locket at her throat felt like a grain of sand in an oyste
