Chapter 1

"Ethan, please," I had whispered, my voice barely audible through the dry oxygen mask. "The doctor said there are complications from the bleeding. Don't leave me alone tonight."

"Her memorial bench on the bluff might get damaged in this storm, Grace," Ethan had said, pulling his hand away from my trembling fingers without meeting my eyes. "I made a promise to her soul. I have to protect it."

"You're in a hospital, Grace. You have doctors and nurses everywhere," he pressed on, already tossing his coat over his arm. "Chloe only has me."

Chloe.

His dead fiancée. The woman who drowned seven years ago, whose phantom hovered over every corner of my life. For seven years, her memory had been an untouchable shrine, an excuse for him to keep one foot out of our marriage.

Forty-one times. In seven years, that was the forty-first time Ethan had abandoned me at dinners, birthdays, and anniversaries to tend to her memory.

But this was the first time he did it while the sheets beneath me were still damp with the loss of our child.

I didn't scream. I didn't break down.

Something inside me, the part that loved him, simply clicked shut.

"Sign here if you understand the risks of leaving against medical advice, Mrs. Voss."

The nurse's voice was gentle, but the cold numbness in my chest was absolute. Behind her, the ultrasound monitor was completely dark. No flutter. No heartbeat.

Ten weeks of quiet hope had dissolved under cold surgical lights on our seventh wedding anniversary.

And the plastic visitor's chair beside my hospital bed was already cold.

My husband hadn't left for an urgent meeting at his architecture firm. He had walked out twenty minutes ago, right after a single silent notification lit up his screen.

I watched the color drain from his face, replaced by a frantic panic he had never once shown for me.

I took the stylus from the nurse and signed the discharge form with steady hands.

The sharp cramping in my lower abdomen pulsed with every breath, but I forced my spine straight.

I pulled off the plastic hospital band, dropped it into the trash, and changed into my clothes.

I was too weak to drive through the storm, so I booked a rideshare through my phone.

The driver pulled up to the emergency entrance under the driving rain.

He glanced at my pale skin and the way I held my coat tightly against my stomach. "You okay to travel, ma'am? Where are we headed?"

"North Point Bluff," I said, leaning my head against the cold glass.

It was the private seaside cabin Ethan had strictly forbidden me from stepping foot in for seven years. The locked sanctuary where he supposedly went to mourn his deceased bride in private.

Tonight, I was going to see what he was really protecting.