Clarissa refused to drop me off, even far enough down the street from the garage that I could act like I'd walked. She did, however, point me unhelpfully back toward the giant T marking the train station I'd arrived at earlier that morning.

At least she had the decency to pay for breakfast.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and scanned the cars as I walked through the garage's parking lot. The 70s muscle car was missing, and I hoped to God it was Ciar's.

Nobody else works the night shift, he'd said. It was daytime now, so he must have gone home, right?

"Hello?" I called as I stepped into the open shop. The muscle car was parked inside, ready for work, and I noted the galloping horse on its grille. A Mustang.

"Back already?"

I whirled around, my heart slamming against my ribcage as Ciar came into view, grinning like a little kid. A murderous, creepy little kid.

"Missed me?" he added smugly. "Wish I could say I was surprised."

I glared at him, cinching my arms tight around myself.

As he reached into his back pocket, I noticed the exact same pattern of stains littered across his jeans as the night before. He pulled out a thin card, offering it to me between his first two fingers.

My driver's license.

"I assume that's what you're here for?"

I hadn't even remembered the damn license. The second shop hadn't asked for one, and Ciar had basically thrown me out without a chance to gather my thoughts or belongings. I snatched at it, but he pulled it back out of my reach, holding it up so that we could both look at my grim portrait.

"She doesn't look like you," he said.

At first, his words clashed dissonantly against each other. "She" had to mean Tilda, right? But his use of the present tense threw me off, and it took me a solid thirty seconds to realize that he meant the photo on the license.

I finally grabbed it from him, holding it gingerly around the edges because he smelled exactly like a mechanic who'd been up all night in motor oil. I shoved it into my front pocket and scowled. "In case you haven't noticed, a lot has happened since then."

Something passed over his face, soft and barely perceptible, like the shadow of a thin, wispy cloud in front of the blazing sun. His lips parted, but before he could say anything, the crunch of tires echoed from the parking lot, and we both turned toward it.

A white Tesla pulled up, its engine silent, and glided into place alongside the rest of the shiny fleet outside.

"You should go." Ciar shoved me toward the door, whatever I had seen disappearing like fog under the sun.

"I—"

"Just get the hell out of here," he said through gritted teeth.

A door slammed outside, and then the scuff of shoes across the gravel preceded Donovan Cosgrave through the door.

Something flashed through Ciar's eyes in the instant before I looked away. For half a second, he shifted from predator to prey, some combination of guilt and fear tingeing his arrogance.

But quick as a flash, it disappeared. "What're you doing here?" he asked, lifting his chin toward Donovan.

Donovan smiled, and in its warmth I couldn't imagine two people being more opposite. "Keeping a promise," he said, then looked at me and tilted his head toward the door.

Ciar's eyes flicked between the two of us. "Wait, you already know each other?"

I bit my lip. There went the only remaining rational explanation as to how he'd known my name last night. But if Donovan hadn't told him about me, why hadn't he seemed surprised?

Donovan's lips twitched upward. "It's a long story." He raised his eyebrows at me. "You ready?"

I nodded. He didn't have to ask me twice to get out of there.

I took one step, but Ciar took a bigger one, throwing his arm out and almost catching me in the chin. I threw him another glare, but he was too busy staring his brother down.

"Don't do this."

The urgency in Ciar's tone sent chills down my arms, such a departure from his smug, condescending confidence. I heard the warning there, too, but it wasn't an "or else." Whatever threat lurked behind those words, it wasn't his.

"We're just going to look through Tillie's old things," Donovan said. "She's her sister. She deserves that much."

He reached out for me, and I stepped forward again but stopped just short of taking his hand. Ciar's eyes felt a lot like those of a disapproving father, and I barely contained my shivers as I followed Donovan out of the garage.

"Sorry," he said as we got into his car. "Ciar's a bit...rough around the edges? But he's harmless."

"Right." I definitely didn't get the harmless vibe from him, but I shut my mouth because my mission hinged on not offending his brother.

The silence of the electric engine did nothing to break up the awkward nothing between us. The kiss weighed heavily on my shoulders, along with the things he'd told me last night.

Was it really only last night? It felt like a lifetime.

Finally, I cleared my throat. "Why couldn't I just meet you there?"

"I was on the other side of town taking care of business. I didn't want you to have to wait around outside until I got back."

I didn't point out that waiting alone with Ciar was probably a lot less safe. Instead, I asked myself what Clarissa would do and blurted, "What kind of business?"

The second it slipped out, my fingers twitched, and I had to stop myself from slapping a hand over my mouth. Act natural. Like you don't know you're asking about his criminal whereabouts. There was no reason for him to suspect an ulterior motive for my question.

He just laughed a little. "Boring business, trust me."

I didn't know if I was imagining the finality in his voice, so I didn't push it. As we left a cracked side street littered with potholes and turned onto a freshly-paved residential road, I wondered how safe I was, alone in a car with someone who'd supposedly stolen government secrets, not to mention possibly murdered four women. Was Clarissa tracking my position right now, just in case?

But no matter how hard I thought about it, how vividly I remembered the faces of those missing women, I couldn't bring myself to worry about it. And I didn't know if that was blatant disregard for my own life or some guttural instinct to trust Donovan, and I also didn't know if I cared which one.

Donovan finally pulled up to a medium-sized house—the kind that looked big, but only in a city. A tiny white Fiat sat at the front, parked in by a sleek black McLaren. I gaped at the sports car as I stumbled out of Donovan's Tesla.

He laughed at my shock. "It's not mine, it's Ciar's. It's just a bit safer here. He doesn't live in the nicest part of town."

I picked my jaw up off the asphalt and followed him to the front porch. Something about his brother didn't add up. He apparently worked grueling shifts as a mechanic and lived in less than desirable conditions, yet judging by the photos I'd found on his Facebook page and now the McLaren in the driveway, he was well-off enough to buy expensive cars.

We stepped inside, and all thoughts of cars vanished as I realized that this was a house, an honest-to-god house on both the inside and out. Not sectioned into apartments. The term single-family home hit me like a sledgehammer.

Donovan and Tilda would have been a family, and this would have been their home. In Boston, it might as well have been a mansion. I understood now what Clarissa had meant about Donovan living beyond his means.

My earlier question seemed particularly relevant now. What was his business?

Selling national security secrets to terrorists, I reminded myself.

But I still kicked off my shoes and followed him as he started to climb the stairs. Self-preservation had deserted me a long time ago, but even if it hadn't, the need to see and hold tangible pieces of Tilda's life here would have pulled me after him anyway.

He treaded lightly down the thick carpeted hallway, as if there was anyone to disturb. He stopped for a moment with his hand on the knob of the last door, and when he finally turned it, the crack of the door separating from the jamb told me it had been a long time since anyone had ventured inside.

I stood in the doorway for a moment, my heart tugging me in but my feet refusing to obey. It had the musty, haunted feel of a Victorian mansion. Bluish fuzz dusted the comforter, but the bed was a king-size. My eyes followed the graceful swell of the headboard, the ornate swirls and deep, expensive mahogany.

This was no guest bed. And as I noticed the door off to the side, propped open just enough to show the sliver of a bathroom, everything fell into place.

This had been their bedroom. And, judging by the looks of it, he hadn't set foot in here since her death.

Until now. With me.

An eerie chill ran up my spine, raising goosebumps everywhere it touched. Her presence loomed like a shadow in the corner, pressing down on my shoulders and turning the air to ice in my lungs. I felt myself slipping closer to its darkness, obeying the gentle pull like a swimmer floating in the ocean's ebb and flow.

Closer to her.

And then she rose from within as Donovan pulled back the closet door. Dresses, short shorts, jeans so ripped that they might as well have been cheesecloth. Low-cut blouses, equal parts soft pastels and loud neons.

And lots and lots of red.

Red isn't my color. My wry comment to Clarissa echoed in my memory, along with Ciar's affirmation last night. And yet, at that moment, red was my color. Our color.

Somewhere in a deep corner of my soul, a piece of me called out a warning. A piece that clung to my therapy, a piece that didn't want to go back to padded cells and pills.

But Tilda pressed herself against my skin from the outside, and she lined my lungs from the inside. My memories met Donovan's, gathering in the space under my collarbone.

Like a zombie, I stepped toward the closet. Under her clothes, cardboard boxes sat in neat stacks. Half of the rack was conspicuously empty, where his wardrobe had once sat beside hers. Homage to their relationship, the nothingness no doubt a reflection of his heart.

"I'll leave you alone." He studied me, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from her things. "Like I said, take anything you want."

And then, like a ghost, he disappeared. I wanted to reach for him and beg him not to leave me like she had, but all I could do was breathe her in.

Alone with her ghost pounding at my walls, I lifted a short dress from the rack. I held it up to myself, turning to the full-length mirror beside the bed. I imagined its scarlet silk clinging to my body, the slit up the right thigh shimmying suggestively as I walked.

As I looked at my face—Tilda's face—in the reflection, the urge to slip the dress on and go downstairs rose so strong that I had one strap off the hanger before I could stop myself. How simple would it be to become her, step into her life, surprise Donovan in this dress and start living from where she'd left off?

I could almost feel the weight of that heavy diamond on my ring finger. His chest under my fingertips as I posed, all smiles, showing it off for the camera in Provincetown. Blissfully unaware of the events to come, because they wouldn't come. Tilda was alive. I was alive. I'd never died in the first place.

A tiny clatter from downstairs jolted me back into myself. It called to me from the days when the house Mark and I owned used to echo with the tiny sounds of life. I had been alone in the silence for so long that I'd started to forget those noises.

For a long moment, the two of us waged war inside me, fighting like the siblings we were: her, clawing up from the abyss to take her life back; and me, clinging desperately to the edge of sanity.

"Let me have this," I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut until they ached.

I inhaled until I felt like my lungs might burst, and finally, bit by bit, she unwrapped herself from me and slunk back into my depths.