The gate won't open. I've been pulling on the iron bars for what feels like an hour, but it's probably been thirty seconds. My dress is soaked through at the hem, mud and something darker climbing up the white satin like it's trying to swallow it. Behind me, the street is on fire in three places. "Julian!" My voice tears on the way out. "Julian, open the gate!" Through the glass doors of the estate, I can see them. Warm light behind them, like nothing in the world has gone wrong. Julian in his father's old wedding suit, the one that was supposed to be mine to unbutton tonight. And Celeste, my sister in every way that matters except blood, standing where I should be standing, wearing white. She sees me first. I watch her see me. She doesn't move. "Celeste!" I slam both palms against the bars. "Let me in, they're coming, let me in-" She says something to Julian. I can't hear it through the glass, but I know the shape of her mouth well enough after twenty years to read the words. Not yet. Not yet. Behind me, something screams that used to be a person. I don't turn around fast enough. I feel it before I see it - hands, too many joints, closing around my arm and yanking me off my feet. The iron bars scrape my knuckles as I lose my grip. I'm screaming Julian's name and my own name and God's name, all of it useless, all of it swallowed by the sound of the city dying around this one house that decided it would keep its lights on. The last thing I see through the glass is Celeste, watching. Not screaming. Not moving to help. Smiling. Then there's only pain, and then there's only white, and then there's nothing at all. * I wake up gasping like I've been underwater. Sunlight. Actual, ordinary morning sunlight, slatting gold through curtains I recognize - my curtains, the cream linen ones I picked out two years ago because they matched nothing and I liked that they matched nothing. My hands come up in front of my face on instinct, checking for the wounds, and they're clean. Whole. No blood under the nails, no torn skin at the knuckles where the gate tore me open. My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth. I'm alive. I don't understand what that means yet, not really, not in the way that will matter in about four seconds, because right now all I understand is the animal fact of breathing, of my ribs expanding, of the ordinary weight of a comforter over ordinary legs that both still work. Then I understand the second thing. This is my old room. My room from before I moved into the west wing to be closer to Julian's family. The one with the water stain on the ceiling shaped like a rabbit that Celeste used to tease me about. I haven't slept in this room in over a year. My phone is on the nightstand, screen dark. My hand is shaking when I pick it up. The date is wrong. I sit with it a long moment, thumb over the glass, waiting for the numbers to rearrange themselves into something that makes sense. They don't. Three months. The phone is telling me it is three months before my wedding day. Three months before the fire, before the gate, before Celeste's mouth shaping not yet while I died in front of her. I laugh. It comes out wrong, cracked down the middle, nothing like a laugh at all. "Okay," I say out loud, to no one, to the rabbit-shaped stain on the ceiling. "Okay." There's a knock at the door before I've decided what okay is even supposed to mean. "Ivy?" Celeste's voice, muffled through the wood. Bright. Careless. The voice of a girl who hasn't decided yet whether she wants my life or just wants me gone from it. "You're going to be late for the tasting. Mom's already threatening to strangle the caterer without you." Every hair on my arms lifts at once. I know that voice. I heard that voice through glass three months from now, watching me die, saying two words I will never stop hearing as long as I live, however long that ends up being this time. "Ivy?" She knocks again, softer. "You okay in there? You've got, like, a look on your face already and I haven't even seen your face." I make myself stand. My legs hold. That, at least, is new information - everything about my body works exactly the way it's supposed to, which means whatever just happened to me happened somewhere else, in some other version of this morning that this version doesn't remember living yet. I open the door. Celeste is standing there in an old sweatshirt and no makeup, hair scraped back, holding two coffee cups like she does every morning, one of them already made exactly how I like it because she's known how I like my coffee since we were nine years old and our fathers decided we'd be sisters whether either of us agreed to it or not. She looks at me and her whole face changes. "You've been crying," she says, and there's something in her voice I haven't let myself hear in months - actual worry, the kind that used to be real before it stopped being real, or before I stopped being able to tell the difference. "Ivy. What happened?" I look at her for a long time. Long enough that her smile falters completely. Not yet, she said. Standing behind glass while the city burned. Not yet. But this Celeste, this morning, hasn't done that. Not yet, either. Three months of not-yet stretch out in front of me like a road I've already driven once, blind, and crashed at the end of. "Nothing," I say, and I take the coffee she's holding out to me, and I don't spill a drop, and my hand doesn't shake at all anymore. "Bad dream." "Must have been a hell of a dream." "You have no idea." She laughs, relieved, already turning to head back down the hall, already talking about the caterer and the flowers and whether Julian's mother is going to have opinions about the seating chart again. I watch her walk away from me in a sweatshirt three sizes too big, this girl I loved my whole life, this girl who watched me die and didn't move. I have three months. I take a sip of coffee made exactly the way I like it, and I start making a list.

The list has four things on it by the time I've finished the coffee. One. Move money somewhere Celeste can't touch and my father can't "manage" for me. Two. Buy the Route 9 warehouse district before anyone else understands why it matters. Three. Find out exactly when the first case gets reported, because I know it happens but I don't know the date down to the day, and a day is going to matter more than anyone alive right now understands. Four. Stay close enough to Julian and Celeste that I see it coming before it happens again, instead of finding out through a pane of glass. I get dressed. I go downstairs. I walk into my father's study without knocking, which I never do, and he looks up from his desk like I've grown a second head. "I want to talk about the trust," I say. "Good morning to you too." He sets down his pen. Richard Sterling has the kind of face that's spent thirty years deciding what other people are allowed to see on it, and right now what he's allowing is mild, indulgent confusion. "What trust?" "Mine. The one that transfers to me on my wedding day. I want it moved into an account Julian's family has no visibility into, and I want it done before the ceremony, not after." "Ivy." He says my name the way you'd say it to a child who's just announced she wants to marry the family dog. "That trust is structured the way it's structured because the merger requires certain assurances. If you start moving money around three months before your wedding, it looks like you don't trust the Ashfords." "I don't." That gets a real reaction, at least. His eyebrows go up. "You've never said that before." "I'm saying it now." I sit down across from him without being asked, which I also never do. "I want the warehouse district on Route 9 too. All of it, if it's still available. I'll use my own money if you won't authorize the company's." "The industrial lots? Ivy, that land's been sitting empty for a decade because it's worthless. What in God's name would you want with a warehouse district?" I look at him for a second too long, the way I looked at Celeste this morning, because I keep forgetting that these people don't know yet what I know, that from where they're sitting I'm just their daughter having an unusually strange morning. "Call it a hobby," I say. "Humor me." He doesn't. He tells me he'll think about the trust, which means no, and that the warehouses are a waste of a conversation, which also means no, and I leave his study understanding that I am going to have to do this myself, with my own money, without my father's blessing or his company's leverage. Which is how I end up, an hour later, standing in the lobby of a title office downtown that handles exactly the kind of unglamorous industrial real estate nobody in my family has looked at twice in ten years. And that is how I meet Damian Vale for the first time in this life, six days before either of us has any idea we'll need each other. He's at the counter ahead of me, and I almost don't register him at all - dark coat, dark hair, the kind of stillness some men have that reads as either very calm or very dangerous, and I've spent enough of my life around men who perform calm to know the difference. This isn't performance. "-all four parcels," he's saying to the clerk. "Not three. I was explicit about that on the phone." "Sir, parcel four's already got interest from another buyer, I'm real sorry, it came in about an hour ago-" "Whose interest." The clerk's eyes flick toward me before he can stop them, and I understand two things at the exact same moment, one right after the other like dominoes. The first is that the interest party is me - my assistant filed the paperwork this morning while I was still arguing with my father. The second is that the four parcels on Route 9 that this stranger wants, all of them, no substitutions, are the exact four parcels on my list. He turns around. I don't know what I expect. I've imagined this moment exactly zero times, because six hours ago I didn't know this man existed. What I get is a face that's doing the same math I just did, watching it land the same way, and for one long second neither of us says anything at all. "You're the interested party," he says. Not a question. "Apparently." "On parcel four." "On all four, actually. I filed this morning." Something shifts behind his eyes - not surprise exactly, something colder and more useful than surprise, like a man recalculating a bet he thought he'd already won. "That's an unusual thing for a Sterling to be doing with her Tuesday." "I don't remember telling you my name." "You didn't have to." He nods toward the counter, where the clerk is very studiously pretending not to listen. "There's a photograph of your engagement announcement on the society page of this morning's paper. I read the paper." I should feel exposed by that. Instead I feel something sharper, something closer to recognition, because a man who reads the society page for information instead of gossip is a man doing exactly what I've spent this morning doing - treating the ordinary surface of the world like it's covering something else. "Why do you want four empty warehouses nobody's touched in a decade," I say. "Why do you." "I asked first." The corner of his mouth moves, not quite a smile. "Ms. Sterling. I don't discuss business with strangers in title office lobbies." "Then it's a good thing we won't be strangers for very long. I'm about to outbid you." That gets the almost-smile to finish the job. "You could try." "I will." "Then I suppose," he says, already turning back to the counter, already dismissing me with the particular ease of a man who's decided the conversation is over when he says it's over, "we'll see who understood what those parcels were worth first." I watch him hand the clerk a card, watch the clerk's whole posture change the way people's postures change around a certain kind of money, and I feel the ground under this morning tilt sideways. I came here today because I remember what happens on Route 9 in four months, when the collapse cuts every supply road east of the river except the one that runs straight through those warehouses. I came here because I have information nobody alive is supposed to have. He came here today too. Which means either Damian Vale knows something he shouldn't, exactly the way I do - or he's about to become the very first person, in this life or the last one, standing directly between me and the one advantage I thought was mine alone. "Ms. Sterling," the clerk says weakly, "did you want to place your bid now, or-" I don't take my eyes off the back of Damian Vale's coat as he walks toward the door. "Now," I say. "All four parcels. Whatever he offered, double it." He stops in the doorway. Doesn't turn around. But I see his shoulders go still in a way that tells me he heard exactly what I said, and exactly what it means, and that this is very much not the last conversation we're going to have about Route 9.

Damian Vale calls me before I've even made it back to the house. I don't recognize the number, but I recognize the voice the second he speaks, low and unhurried, like he's got all the time in the world and wants me to notice that I don't. "Doubling my offer was a mistake," he says, no hello, nothing. "Is that a threat or a compliment?" "An observation. You don't know what those parcels are worth. You just knew I wanted them, and that was enough for you." I stop walking, right there on the sidewalk outside the title office, because he's not wrong and I hate that he's not wrong. "Maybe I know exactly what they're worth." "Then tell me what they're worth." "No." A pause. Somewhere behind him I can hear traffic, a city being ordinary. "Fair enough," he says, and there's something almost like approval in it, which annoys me more than if he'd laughed at me outright. "Here's my counter, Ms. Sterling. I split the parcels with you. Two and two. You take the two on the east side, I take the two on the west, and neither of us bankrupts ourselves proving a point in a title office." "Why would I agree to that?" "Because you don't actually want all four. You want to make sure I don't have all four. There's a difference, and it's an expensive one if we keep pretending there isn't." He's right about that too, and it makes my skin prickle, because six hours ago I would have said nobody alive could read me that precisely on a first meeting. "How do you know I don't want all four?" "Because if you wanted them for the reason I think you want them," he says, and his voice drops just slightly, just enough that I understand he's chosen every word of this sentence on purpose, "you'd know that two parcels facing the river road are worth more to you than four facing away from it. You'd have known that this morning. You didn't. You bid on instinct, not on a plan." I don't answer right away, because I'm too busy recalculating exactly how much this man might already know. "Two and two," I say finally. "East side's mine. And you tell me why you want the west parcels." "No," he says, pleasant as anything, echoing my own word back at me, and hangs up before I can decide whether I'm furious or something worse than furious. * Julian comes for dinner that night, the way he does every Thursday, and watching him walk through my front door is like watching a photograph of a man I used to love. "There she is." He kisses my cheek, easy, warm, exactly the way he's kissed my cheek every Thursday for the last year. "Your father tells me you had opinions about the trust this morning." "I had opinions about a lot of things this morning." "Good ones, I hope." He says it like a joke, already moving past me into the dining room, already greeting Celeste with the same easy warmth he just gave me, and I watch it happen this time instead of just living inside it - the exact half-second too long his hand stays on her shoulder, the exact way her eyes go to him and then away, quick, before either of them thinks anyone's counting. Nobody at this table thinks anyone's counting. I've spent a year not counting. "You've gone quiet," Julian says to me, over the second course, and there's real attention in it, real warmth, the kind of warmth that used to make me think I could grow to love a man I'd been assigned instead of chosen. "Everything all right?" "Just thinking about the wedding," I say, and it isn't even a lie. "Don't think too hard. That's what I'm for." He smiles the smile I used to find charming and now find unbearable to look at directly, and reaches over to squeeze my hand, and under the table, not two feet from where his hand is holding mine, Celeste's phone buzzes against her thigh. She glances down at it. Just once. Fast. I watch her face do something small and private that she thinks nobody at this table is built to notice. I am, now. I am exactly built to notice it. * I find her an hour later, after Julian's gone home and my father's retreated to his study and the house has gone quiet in the particular way it does at night when everyone's decided the day is officially over. She's on the back terrace, phone pressed to her ear, and she doesn't hear the door behind her because she's not expecting anyone to be listening. Nobody ever expects Celeste to be watched. That's always been the whole architecture of her - invisible enough to get away with things, charming enough that no one looks twice. I used to be the same way, before I died once and came back paying attention. "-no, she doesn't know anything," Celeste is saying, low, fast, her free hand pressed against her collarbone the way she does when she's nervous and thinks no one can see it. "I told you, the timeline's fine, we just need the board vote to go through before anyone starts asking about the Route 9 data. If Marcus finds out I pulled those files before the audit-" She stops. I don't know if she heard the door, or felt the air change, or just has the animal instinct our whole family seems to run on when something's gone wrong in a room. But she turns around, phone still pressed to her ear, and she sees me standing in the doorway in my bare feet, and every warm thing on her face goes out at once like someone's found the switch. "I'll call you back," she says into the phone, very quietly, and hangs up before whoever's on the other end can answer. Neither of us says anything for a second that stretches out longer than it has any right to. "How long have you been standing there," she says. "Long enough," I say, "to hear you talk about pulling files before an audit. Marcus Ashford's audit." Her face does three things in quick succession - fear, calculation, and then something that settles into a smile so practiced I almost believe it, almost the way I would have believed it four months ago, standing on the wrong side of a locked gate. "It's nothing," she says. "Company stuff. Boring stuff. You know how Dad gets about the merger, everybody's covering themselves for the audit, it's not-" "Route 9," I say. "That's what you said. Route 9 data." The smile doesn't move, but something behind her eyes goes very still, the way water goes still right before something underneath it decides to break the surface. "You're imagining things," she says. "Go to bed, Ivy. Big day tomorrow." She walks past me into the house without waiting to see if I believe her, and I stand there on the cold terrace tile in my bare feet, listening to her footsteps recede up the stairs, thinking about four warehouses on a stretch of road nobody in this city has cared about in a decade, and a woman on the other end of a phone call who apparently cares about it very much indeed.