The water took me without ceremony.
I had imagined this fall for two weeks, the way I once imagined wedding days. I had pictured the drop, the wind, the moment of weightlessness before the sea accepted me. None of my imagining covered the shock of the cold. It hit my chest like a closed fist, drove the air out of my lungs, and the black water closed over my head with a sound like a door slamming.
I did not fight it.
I had planned for this. The storm had been part of the plan, the dark part, the part Arthur and Vanessa had handed me when they killed my brother and called it clean. A woman who falls into a winter sea at night does not surface. A woman who surfaces is caught by searchlights, photographed, questioned, and buried in someone's basement again.
The current took me sideways bef
