WREN Pov I woke up already knowing I was going to die again. Not today. Not this hour. But somewhere down the road of this exact life, in a hospital hallway that smelled like bleach and burning, with my hands pressed against a door that nobody on the other side would open. I remembered the sound of my own voice going hoarse from screaming. I remembered begging. I remembered the moment I understood that no one was coming, and that the last thing I would ever feel was the cold of the floor soaking through my scrubs while something inside me stopped moving. I sat up so fast the room tilted. Sunlight. Clean sheets. The soft hum of the air conditioner I used to hate and had forgotten I loved. My hand went to my stomach before my mind caught up to my body, and I froze, waiting to feel nothing, waiting for the emptiness that had been the last true thing I'd ever felt. There was a flutter. Faint. Alive. I let out a breath that turned into something closer to a sob, and I pressed both hands flat against my abdomen like I could hold the moment there by force. Three months. I still had three months before any of it began. Three months before the birthday that was supposed to save Bradley's company and instead ended the world I knew. I had died pregnant. I am pregnant now. And nobody - not one living soul the first time - had known that. That was the part I intended to change first. My phone told me the date before I let myself hope it was lying. It wasn't. I was back. Somehow, impossibly, I was back on the exact morning everything had started coming apart, and I had every scrap of what came after sitting in my skull like shrapnel. I didn't cry long. I'd promised myself, in whatever place you go when you die and don't stay there, that I would not waste this on crying. By the time Bradley knocked on the bedroom door, I had already decided two things. I would call my grandmother before the sun went down. And I would not, under any circumstances, let him see my hands shake. "You're up," he said, like it surprised him that I still existed in the mornings. "I'm up." He didn't come in. He stood in the doorway in the charcoal suit I remembered burning in a pile of ash three months from now, and he held a folder against his chest the way other men held a shield. "We need to talk," he said. I already knew what was in the folder. I knew the font on the header, the exact paragraph where my name was spelled with the y instead of the i because some paralegal hadn't checked twice. I knew, before he crossed the room, that he would not sit down, that he would set it on the table between us like it was a business deal and not the end of five years, that he would say the words division of assets before he ever said the word divorce, because to Bradley, dismantling a marriage and dismantling a merger required exactly the same vocabulary. "Sit down," I said instead of screaming any of that at him. Something flickered across his face - surprise, maybe, that I wasn't already crying, wasn't already on my feet. He sat. He set the folder down between us anyway. "I've asked for a divorce," he said. "The papers are drafted. I need you to look them over and sign." Last time, I asked him why. I had asked until my throat was raw and he'd looked at me like the question itself was an inconvenience. This time I didn't ask. I already knew every answer he would give, and every answer would still be a lie stacked on top of a truth he didn't understand yet himself - that his stepmother had spent years building a version of his life he thought was his own idea. "Is there someone else," I said instead, and I watched it land on him like I'd hit a nerve he thought was buried. "That's not relevant to the settlement." "That's not a no." He didn't answer. He didn't need to. I had already lived the version of this conversation where he lied to my face about it for another six weeks before I found out the truth on my own, standing in a hospital corridor holding paperwork that wasn't about a divorce at all. I wasn't interested in living that version twice. I opened the folder. I read three lines I already had memorized, and I picked up the pen he'd brought - of course he'd brought his own pen, the heavy silver one his grandfather had given him before he died, the one he only used for things he considered final - and I signed my name exactly where I'd signed it the first time. His shoulders dropped half an inch. Relief. He'd expected a fight and I hadn't given him one, and some small, stupid, still-hoping part of me wanted him to notice that the woman in front of him wasn't behaving like the woman he remembered marrying. He didn't notice. He never had, not until it was too late to matter. "Thank you," he said, like I'd done him a favor instead of ended us. "You should go," I told him. "I'm sure you have somewhere to be." He stood. He hesitated at the door in a way that, the first time, I had let myself believe meant something. I knew better now. I watched him check his phone before he even reached the hallway, watched the corner of his mouth do the thing it did when he was reading a message from someone he didn't want me to know about. I followed him out anyway. Some instinct, some need to see it again with clear eyes instead of the shattered ones I'd had the first time, pulled me those extra ten steps to the front hall. She was already there. She stood just inside the doorway like she'd been waiting for exactly this moment to be seen, one hand resting low against her stomach in a gesture I recognized because I made the same one myself an hour ago, alone, in a bed that wasn't going to be mine much longer. She wasn't showing yet. Not enough for a stranger to notice. But I wasn't a stranger, and I knew what that hand meant the second I saw it, the way you know a word in a language you were born speaking. Bradley crossed the hall to stand beside her without a flicker of shame, like the two of us occupying the same house wasn't a violence in itself. "Wren," he said, and there was no apology anywhere in his voice, "this is Selene." She smiled at me. It wasn't cruel. That was almost worse. She looked at me the way you look at a chapter that's already closed, something to be polite to on your way out the door. I smiled back, because I had already died once not knowing how to survive this exact moment, and I was not going to let it break me twice. "Congratulations," I said, and I let my eyes drop, just once, to the hand resting on her stomach, so she would know that I knew. What neither of them understood - what neither of them would understand for months, not until it was far too late to matter to anyone but me - was that I had a hand resting on the exact same place, on the exact same secret, and that the timing of mine would break this family apart in a way no divorce ever could. Selene was pregnant. So was I. And only one of us was going to be believed.

WREN Pov I didn't cry until I was three blocks from the house. I pulled over on a side street I didn't recognize until I did, one of those streets you drive past a hundred times without seeing, and I sat there with both hands on the wheel and let it out the way I hadn't let myself in front of him. Not for Bradley. Not really. I cried because I had done all of that - the folder, the pen, her hand on her stomach - with a clear head and a steady voice, and some part of me had wanted, stupidly, to be given credit for surviving it twice. Nobody gives you credit for surviving something nobody else remembers happening once. I called my grandmother before I let myself think better of it. She answered on the second ring, the way she always did, like she kept the phone in her apron pocket out of habit rather than expectation. "Wren?" "Can I come over?" "You're already crying," she said. It wasn't a question. "Come." My grandmother's house still smelled like cardamom and the lemon oil she used on the furniture, and some animal part of my chest unclenched the second I stepped through her door, the way it always had, the way it hadn't in three months of a life I wasn't supposed to get back. She took one look at my face and didn't ask about Bradley first. She put the kettle on. She sat me down at the same table I'd done my homework at as a girl, and she waited, because she had never once in my life needed to fill silence with noise. "He gave me the papers," I said. "I signed them." "Good," she said, which surprised a laugh out of me even with my eyes still wet. "You didn't fight him on it." "Would it have mattered?" "No," she said. "But I raised you to know the difference between a fight worth losing and one worth walking away from. Sounds like you already knew it too." I wrapped both hands around the mug she set in front of me and looked at the tea instead of her face, because what I had to say next required a kind of courage I hadn't needed for the divorce at all. "I'm pregnant," I said. The silence that followed was different from her usual silences. She set her own cup down slowly, like the table might not hold both its weight and this news at the same time. "Does he know?" "No. And he can't. Not yet. Not until I understand what I'm doing." "Wren." My name in her mouth had a warning in it now. "A man doesn't get to walk away from you the same week he finds out he's going to be a father. That's not a secret you get to keep just because you're angry." "It's not anger." I made myself look up at her. "Grandma, I need you to listen to something, and I need you to not decide I've lost my mind before I finish." She didn't promise me that. She was too honest for that. But she folded her hands on the table and waited, and I told her. I told her about the hospital hallway, the smell of it, the sound of my own voice going raw. I told her about the door nobody opened. I told her that I had died - actually died, not fainted, not dreamed - pregnant and alone in a version of this year that hadn't happened yet, and that I had woken up this morning three months earlier with every hour of it sitting in my head like something I'd lived instead of something I'd imagined. I told her about the outbreak. The disease that didn't just kill people but unmade them first, turned people you loved into something that used to wear their face. I told her it started small, the way disasters always start small enough for everyone to ignore, and that it would come from Bradley's family's lab, from money I had helped funnel toward a research division I hadn't understood I was arming. I told her it would happen on Bradley's thirtieth birthday. When I finished, she didn't say anything for a long moment. Her face had gone carefully blank in the way I recognized from childhood, the face she used when she was deciding how gently to tell me something I didn't want to hear. "You've had a terrible shock," she finally said. "The divorce. The pregnancy. It would break anyone's mind a little, having to carry both of those alone." "I knew you'd say that." "Because it's true, sweetheart. Grief does strange things. It doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel it, but it doesn't mean the things you're seeing are real." I didn't argue with her. I had expected this, had lived enough of my life to know that no one believes a thing like this the first time it's said out loud, no matter how much they love you. I only asked her not to repeat it to anyone, and she agreed to that much at least, because whatever she believed about the vision, she believed completely in keeping my secrets safe. "You'll stay for dinner," she said, in the tone that meant it wasn't a request, and she got up to check on something in the oven, and for a moment the kitchen felt like it belonged to a life uncomplicated by anything I remembered. But she wasn't finished with me. She never let a hard thing sit for long without circling back to the part she actually wanted to say. "Whatever you believe you saw," she said, her back still to me at the stove, "that baby is real. And a baby needs a father who knows he's a father, Wren, whatever else is true or isn't." "I can't tell him. Not yet." "Why not?" I didn't have an answer I could give her, not the real one, not the one that involved a man whose name I hadn't said out loud to another living soul and didn't intend to. So I gave her half of it, which was still true. "Because the moment I tell him, it stops being something I control," I said. "And I need it to stay mine a little longer." She turned from the stove then, and there was nothing soft left in her face, only the particular steadiness she used when she meant every word twice as hard as it sounded. "You don't get forever, sweetheart. Whatever you're protecting yourself from by staying quiet, it has a clock on it whether you like the sound of it ticking or not. You know that better than anyone, don't you? Seeing what you think you've seen." I opened my mouth to tell her she didn't understand, that the clock she meant and the clock I meant weren't the same clock at all, and that mine was worse. "I need you to promise me something," she said instead, before I could get a word out. "Promise me you won't let this go three more months without a decision. Not three more days, if you can help it." I didn't answer her right away. I sat there with my hands around a cup gone cold, and I understood, for the first time since I'd woken up that morning, that surviving this life the second time was not going to be a matter of simply remembering what came next. It was going to be a matter of deciding, over and over, what I was willing to let myself become in order to keep it. "I promise," I said. I did not tell her that I already knew exactly how little a promise like that was worth against a clock she couldn't see.

BRADLEY Pov Julian had the documents spread across my desk before I'd even taken my coat off, which told me everything about how the morning was going to go. "You look like a man who already knows what I'm about to say," I told him. "I look like a man who's been up since five reading your grandfather's will for the fortieth time hoping the language changed overnight." He didn't smile when he said it. Julian had been my lawyer for six years and my closest friend for twenty, and the two roles had a way of colliding in my office more often than either of us liked. "It didn't change, Bradley. I need you to actually hear that this time." "I've heard it." "Then hear it again, because in ninety days it stops being a hypothetical and starts being a court filing." He slid the top page toward me, a paragraph I could have recited in my sleep by now. "A legally recognized heir. Unborn or born, doesn't matter which, your grandfather was specific about that much at least. But it has to come with documentation. Proof of pregnancy on record, and proof of paternity that can survive a challenge. Miss either one of those and it doesn't matter whose blood is actually involved. The shares move." "To her." "To your stepmother's side of the family, yes." Julian didn't say her name if he could help it, not since the year she'd tried to have him quietly removed from the board's approved counsel list for reasons that had nothing to do with his competence and everything to do with how little she could control him. "Your father votes with her on everything now. You know that better than I do." "My father hasn't had an original thought in a decade." "That's not an argument, that's a eulogy for a man who's still alive." He said it without heat, the way he said most things that were true and unpleasant. "I'm telling you this as your friend before I tell you as your lawyer. Whatever you think of her, whatever she did to you growing up, she is very good at reading a clock. She has been counting down the same ninety days you have, and she has a candidate ready." I didn't need him to explain who. I'd known for three weeks, since the moment Selene had told me, standing in the kitchen of an apartment my stepmother had conveniently arranged for her to have, that she was carrying my child. I want to be clear, if only to myself, about what I felt in that moment. It wasn't joy. It wasn't relief, not really, though relief was in there somewhere, buried under something heavier. It was the particular, ugly clarity of watching a door close and a different door open in the same instant, and understanding that you were going to walk through the second one whether you'd chosen it or not. "The papers for Wren," I said. "Are they ready?" Julian's jaw worked once before he answered. He'd been at our wedding. He'd stood up when Wren walked in wearing her mother's dress, and he'd told me privately, three drinks into the reception, that he'd never seen me look less like myself, in the best possible way. He had opinions about this that he was choosing, out of loyalty, not to share with me now. "They're ready," he said instead. "I need you to actually read the settlement before you hand it to her, Bradley. Don't just slide a folder across a table like you're closing an acquisition." "That's exactly what it is." "It's your marriage." "It's ninety days from now being the end of everything my grandfather built," I said, sharper than I meant to. "I don't have the luxury of treating it like anything else." He didn't argue further. He'd learned a long time ago which arguments with me were worth losing and which ones weren't. I picked Selene up on my way home, because she'd asked to come, and because some cowardly part of me hadn't wanted to walk into that house alone. She sat in the passenger seat with one hand resting low on her stomach the entire drive, watching the city go by like she already owned a piece of it, which, depending on how the next ninety days went, she might. "Are you going to tell her about the baby today?" she asked. "No." "Why not?" "Because it isn't hers to know yet," I said, which was the kind of answer I gave when I didn't want to admit the real one - that some instinct in me still flinched at the idea of Wren hearing it from my mouth in the same conversation as the word divorce. Wren was already at the table when we came in, like she'd been expecting us at that exact hour, which unsettled me slightly even though I couldn't have said why. I'd built up, without meaning to, an entire private rehearsal of how this would go. Raised voices. Questions I didn't have good answers for. Maybe tears, though Wren had never been a woman who cried easily, not in front of me. I set the folder down between us. "I've asked for a divorce," I said. "The papers are drafted. I need you to look them over and sign." She asked if there was someone else, and I told her it wasn't relevant to the settlement, which both of us understood was its own kind of answer. And then she did something I hadn't planned for, hadn't rehearsed a response to at all. She opened the folder. She read it in silence, faster than I expected, and she picked up the pen I'd brought without being asked and signed her name exactly where it needed to go. No argument. No tears. No question about what she'd done wrong, or what I'd stopped feeling, or when, none of the things I had steeled myself against for a week. Just the scratch of a pen and her steady hand and a calm that didn't match anything I knew about her. It should have felt like relief. Instead something in my chest went cold and wary, the particular unease of watching a door open too easily, like the resistance you expected had simply decided not to show up. "Thank you," I said, because I didn't have anything else ready. "You should go," she told me. "I'm sure you have somewhere to be." I did. I checked my phone on the way to the door out of habit more than need, a message from Julian I didn't have the attention to read yet, and behind me I heard her footsteps follow us as far as the hall, though I didn't understand until much later what she'd wanted to see with her own eyes. Selene was already waiting there when Wren appeared behind me, and I introduced them with a sentence I would spend a long time regretting the flatness of. Wren didn't say much. She smiled, congratulated us, and there was something in the way her eyes dropped once to Selene's stomach that I filed away and didn't examine, because I had a company to save and no room left that week to wonder what my soon-to-be ex-wife was thinking. The moment the door closed behind her, Selene laughed. It wasn't a cruel sound, not exactly, but it had an edge to it I hadn't heard from her before, something almost giddy with relief. She turned into me and wrapped both arms around my neck, and I felt the small, solid curve of her stomach press against me as she pulled close. "She's leaving us for good," she said, against my ear, still laughing. "At last. I was starting to think she'd fight it." "She didn't fight anything." "I know." Selene pulled back enough to look at me, one hand settling low over the child I'd been told for three weeks was mine, and something in her expression didn't quite match the warmth of her voice. "At least I'll deliver safely." I didn't ask her what she meant by that. I told myself it was nothing, a strange thing to say, the kind of sentence that only sounded ominous because I was tired and the ninety-day clock in my head hadn't stopped ticking since Julian first said the word ninety out loud. But I kept turning it over on my way upstairs, the calm on Wren's face when she should have broken, and the small, cold thing underneath Selene's laughter that I couldn't name and didn't like. Something about that day didn't sit right in me. I just didn't yet know which woman I should have been afraid of.