VOWS FOR A DEAD WOMAN

Nora's POV

My coffee hits the floor before I even see him.

The cup just slips right out of my hand, and hot coffee splashes over some guy's shoes, and he's yelling something at me, but I don't hear a word of it. All I hear is my own heartbeat, loud and wrong, banging against my ribs like it's trying to get out.

Because across the platform, through a gap between two strangers, I see a face I buried three years ago.

Marcus Doyle. No, wait, wrong name, my brain is scrambling, it's not Doyle, it's Roy. Roy Ferris. My father's old head of security. The man who used to check my seatbelt before every car ride, back when I was still Josephine Whitlock and not some girl named Nora who rides the 7:42 train and orders the same coffee every single morning as her life depends on the routine.

Maybe it does.

I don't run. Running gets you noticed, and getting noticed is the one thing I've promised myself I will never do again. So I turn my body slow, like I'm just checking the arrivals board, and I walk toward the little newsstand at the end of the platform like I have all the time in the world.

My legs don't agree with that plan. They're shaking so bad I have to grip the metal railing to keep walking straight.

I duck behind a rack of magazines and press my back against the cold glass window of the shop. My reflection stares back at me, pale, eyes too wide, a woman who looks nothing like the confident assistant who walked into this same station a thousand mornings before today.

Three years. Three years of being careful. Three years of small apartments and fake names and never once looking anyone in the eye too long. All of it built on one simple rule: nobody from my old life is supposed to know I'm alive.

So why is Roy Ferris standing forty feet away from me, checking his phone like he's waiting for someone?

I peek around the magazine rack. He's still there. Older than I remember, a little heavier, but it's him. The same square jaw. The same way he stands with his feet apart like he's guarding a door instead of just standing on a train platform.

He hasn't seen me. I tell myself that over and over. He hasn't seen me, he hasn't seen me, he hasn't,

My phone buzzes in my coat pocket, and I nearly scream.

I fumble it out with fingers that don't want to work right and look at the screen, praying it's Greer asking about lunch, praying it's anything normal.

It's not.

Come to my office. Now, E.S.

Emory Sutter. My boss. The man I have spoken maybe eleven words to in the six months I've worked at Sutter Holdings, always through his assistant, always at arm's length, because men like that don't personally text the girl who answers phones on the third floor.

There's no meeting on my calendar. I checked it twice this morning like I always do, because checking things twice is another one of my rules. Nothing was on it an hour ago.

I look back through the gap in the magazine rack. Roy Ferris is still there. But now he's not checking his phone anymore.

He's looking straight at the newsstand.

Straight at me.

My whole body goes cold, the kind of cold that starts in your stomach and crawls up into your throat. I duck lower, heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my ears, and for one long, awful second I actually think this is it. Three years of hiding, and it ends on a train platform on a Tuesday morning because I dropped my coffee.

Then the announcement chimes overhead: the 7:50 train, boarding now, and when I dare to look again, he's gone. Just gone. Swallowed up by the crowd shoving onto the train like he was never there at all.

I don't move for almost a full minute. My hands are shaking so bad I have to sit down on the little bench by the newsstand, and an old woman gives me a strange look, like I might be sick. Maybe I am. Maybe fear does that to a person, turns your whole body into something you don't recognize anymore.

I make myself breathe. In for four seconds, out for four seconds, a trick my mother taught me when I was small and scared of thunderstorms, back before thunderstorms were the least scary thing in my life.

My phone buzzes again.

Where are you? This can't wait.

Emory Sutter has never once texted me twice. He barely looks up from his own desk long enough to remember my name most days. Now he's texting me back to back like the building is on fire, on the same morning a ghost from my old life shows up on my train platform.

That can't be nothing. Two strange things happening on the same morning are nothing.

I stand up on legs that still don't feel steady and start walking toward the office, phone clutched so tight in my hand my knuckles ache. Every few steps I glance behind me, checking doorways, checking faces, checking the reflection in every window I pass. Nobody's there. Nobody's following me. I tell myself that so many times it almost starts to sound true.

The Sutter Holdings building rises at the end of the block, all glass and steel and expensive quiet, the kind of place where nothing bad is supposed to happen. I've walked through those doors two hundred times without a single problem.

Today my stomach twists just looking at it.

I badge in, cross the lobby, and step into the elevator alone. As the doors slide shut, I catch my own reflection in the polished metal, and for one heartbeat, just one, I swear I see someone standing behind me in the reflection too.

I spin around so fast I nearly drop my phone.

The elevator is empty. Of course it's empty. I'm alone in here, just me and my own frightened face staring back from the metal doors, and I almost laugh at myself for jumping at nothing.

Then my phone buzzes one last time, and this message is different from the others. Shorter. Colder.

Don't keep me waiting, Josephine.

I stop breathing.

Nobody at this company knows that name. Nobody in this city is supposed to know that name. I have not heard it out loud in three years, not once, not from anyone, and now it's sitting right there on my screen in a text from a man I've barely spoken to, a man who is waiting for me right now on the top floor with the door already closing behind me.

The elevator dings.

The doors start to open.

And I have absolutely no idea what's waiting for me on the other side.