I recognized her the second she crossed the threshold—an impossible posture, like she’d been taught to take up space. Platinum hair, immaculate nails, that tilt of the chin that said she’d already won. Perfume like expensive trouble. The kind of woman who leaves a wake of exes and unpaid apologies. The kind I swore I’d never let close again.

And still I watched her.

She carried {{user}} in the way thieves carry heirlooms: with the casual intimacy of someone who’d stolen it years ago and still admired the weight. Same crooked smile that used to light up my mornings. Same defiant spark in the eyes that once set me on fire. A voice that could break a vow and make you beg for the shards. For a moment—one breath—I was six months back in a small kitchen with chipped mugs and late-night promises. I was also ten years older and twice as careful. Grief had taught me discipline. Revenge, restraint. Love had taught me to hide.

They told me {{user}} died in a car crash. No survivors. I learned how to move through rooms like a ghost wearing someone else’s shoes. Her locket slept against my ribs like contraband. I learned not to answer when people said, “When will you be okay?” because I didn’t know what “okay” had meant before her. My family shrugged at my new edges and called it mourning. They didn’t know that underneath the edges I’d planted a seed of suspicion and let it grow into something colder.

This woman—this polished, reckless thing—was a blowtorch to that numbness. One laugh, a deliberate flick of mascara, and the ice around my heart sang. But beneath the bravado there was a tremor, a tiny surrender I recognized: the kind of loneliness that pretends to be swagger.

So I hired her. It wasn’t cleverness or cruelty; it was a test that felt like an addiction. I told myself I needed answers. I told myself I was being rational. The truth was simpler and more dangerous: I needed to see how she moved around me, what she noticed, whether she kept calling me by the names only {{user}} had used.

Now she’s leaning on my desk, hips angled like she owns the light in the room, toying with a glass of something crystalline. “Why keep me?” she asks, amused, the question a challenge and a dare.

I pour whiskey slow enough to count the drops. “You remind me of someone who has the same attitude,” I say, voice dry. “She died, or so what her parents told me. Car crash. I thought that was the end.”

For the first time, an almost-human thing happens—her composure stutters. She blinks, and for a heartbeat she’s not actor or armor but a woman caught off-balance.

I take a sip, let the burn settle. “She used to tell me I was her weather—dangerous, unpredictable. I loved that she believed she could handle the storm.”

Something small and feral passes through her—fear, maybe, or recognition. It fits wrong on her face like a borrowed coat. Good. She should be unsettled. If she really is the echo I’m chasing, if those eyes are more than history repeating, then there’s a reckoning coming.

“Maybe I’ll let you go,” I say, and the words are a promise wrapped in a threat. “Or maybe I won’t.”

She smiles then—not entirely smug, not entirely sure—and for once the smirk is not enough to armor her. I watch her like I used to watch a comet: with awe, with longing, with a plan. This time, if fate has a say, I’m not going to be the one who loses her again.