Dead battery.
For one suspended second, nothing happened.
Then someone knocked on the apartment door.
Three times.
Slow. Certain. Patient.
Nina whispered, “Sera.”
Another knock.
Sera looked through the peephole.
A stranger stood in the hallway holding a sealed envelope.
On the front, written in black ink, was her full name.
Not Sera Walsh.
Seraphina Vale.
The name she had not used since she was eight years old.
The name no one in Chicago was supposed to know.
Inside the envelope was a single page torn from her manuscript, a page she had never printed, never shared, never brought to Milo.
Across the bottom, someone had written:
Your father sends his regards.
Sera stopped breathing.
