Istanbul's morning lay over Karacaahmet Cemetery like damp gauze. The mist rising from the wet soil pressed against the cypress trees and would not lift. For Mert, the world had been turned down to silence — as if someone had cut the sound entirely and left only the picture running.
The woman on the funeral bier was the one who had put the name Murat into the world. Fusun Hanim. She was not simply a mother-in-law; she was the only root Murat-the-ghost still had in this earth. And now that root was being committed to the ground.
Mert stood at the head of the procession in his black sunglasses, present as a man who was not supposed to be there at all. A miracle — dead, returned as a ghost, then inexplicably solid again — hidden inside an identity that Kerem and Selin had built around him b
