Rain always made the city look cleaner than it was. Streetlights smeared themselves across slick pavement, neon turned to watercolor, and all the cracks in the concrete blurred at the edges.
It was the only time I almost believed in fresh starts.
I tucked my chin into my scarf and shifted the grocery bag to my other arm, fingers aching from the cold. Two blocks from my apartment, Friday night, the kind of half-quiet you get in a business district after hours—office towers went dark except for the few floors where people forgot how to go home.
I knew something was wrong before I knew what. It was in the way sound changed.
The steady hiss of rain broke on a muffled curse. A shoe scuffed. Metal clinked against glass. Not loud, but sharp enough to snip through my thoughts. I stopped under a flickering streetlamp, heart misfiring.
“Keep walking, Sara,” I muttered under my breath. I had become good at talking myself out of things in the last two years—fights, questions, hope.
But the sound came again, an urgent scrape that sounded too much like the inside of my chest. Against every survival instinct, I turned my head toward the narrow side alley that cut between the old brick printing house and the new glass monstrosity they’d built next to it.
The alley mouth was a strip of darkness, rain falling into it like static. A shape moved inside—no, two. One stumbled, hit the wall with a dull thud. My body went cold, then hot.
I should have called someone. I should have walked away. Instead, I found myself edging closer, my boots splashing in shallow puddles, grocery bag thumping against my leg.
“Please,” a voice rasped from the alley. Male, low, threaded with pain.
It wasn’t the word that stopped me. It was the way the vowel broke.
My fingers loosened. An apple slid out of the bag, rolled toward the gutter. I didn’t move to catch it. My ears filled with a roaring that had nothing to do with the rain as the echo of that sound crashed through me.
He used to say my name like that when he’d been working late, when his tie was loose and his eyes were tired but soft. The same crack.
No. I had signed the death certificate. I had thrown earth on a coffin. I had watched them lower my husband into the ground.
“Just give me the—” another voice snapped, clipped and impatient, and then cut off like someone had pressed mute.
I stepped into the alley before I could talk myself out of it.
The light from the street didn’t reach far. My eyes adjusted slowly; brick loomed on either side, sweating moisture. The air smelled of wet cardboard and old oil. About twenty feet in, a security light glowed over a side door, carving the darkness into high relief.
Two men froze in that thin wedge of light.
One had his back to me, broad shoulders in a dark coat, arm extended like he’d just shoved something—or someone—against the wall. The other was half-leaning, half-sagging, one hand braced against the bricks, the other clamped to his ribs.
It was his face I saw first.
Not even his whole face. Just the angle of his jaw, the shadow of stubble along it, the familiar hollow in his cheek when his teeth clenched. His hair was longer than I remembered, rain-dark and curlier, plastered to his forehead. There was a cut on his cheekbone, freshly red against skin gone too pale. Someone else’s jacket hung off his frame, three sizes too big, its collar turned up as if it didn’t quite know who it belonged to.
