Chapter 1

The fluorescent lights in the hospital corridor were a harsh, blinding white, the same white as the divorce certificate that had been sitting in her bag for a month.

She gripped a thin lab slip in her hand, knuckles pale from the force of it.

All around her, pregnant women and their families came and went, faces glowing with the joy of parents-to-be. She was the only one who didn't belong, huddled in the corner of the row of chairs, shivering with cold.

"Ms. Henson, it really is triplets. The odds are lower than winning the lottery."

The doctor's words still echoed in her ears, a clap of thunder that split her already broken life into something worse.

Day thirty-three after the divorce. No new life had arrived. Instead, Drew Gilbert had left her three little "troubles."

Keep them?

With what.

Drew's face when he asked for the divorce, cold as a block of ice, still drifted through her nightmares.

He'd said it plainly. He didn't want children, and he didn't want to waste away with her in a marriage with no passion left in it.

Rosalie Henson closed her eyes and forced the tears back down.

If it was over, it should be over cleanly.

She stood and walked toward the window marked "Family Planning Clinic," each step like walking on the edge of a knife.

She had no way of knowing that half an hour later, that cold operating-room door would be kicked open by someone in a way that bordered on madness.

A month earlier, the day Rosalie moved out of that home, it had been raining.

Drew wasn't there. Or rather, he'd made a point of being gone.

The man was always thorough. Even the division of assets in the divorce agreement was worked out down to the last detail. The house was hers, the car was hers, the savings split down the middle.

The only thing he wouldn't give her was himself.

Rosalie looked at the empty closet, the black hole left behind when Drew's half was cleared out, the exact shape of the hollow in her chest right now.

She crouched on the floor packing, and dug out a tin biscuit box.

It was an old thing from years back, the pattern on the lid worn colorless.

She opened it. Inside, packed full, were candy wrappers.

White Rabbit ones, Alpenliebe ones, and those fifty-cent packs of Pop Rocks.

Every single wrapper was one Drew had given her.

Rosalie and Drew had grown up together, back when they were still toddlers running around in split-bottom pants.

Back then all the kids in the compound were scared of Drew. He'd been a little terror from the start, fighting and skipping class, good at all of it, and yet he had a strange kind of patience for Rosalie, who trailed after him everywhere.

In kindergarten, when Rosalie couldn't grab a carton of the snack-time milk and cried until snot bubbled out of her nose, Drew wiped her nose with obvious disgust while he stuck the straw into his own milk and pushed it into her mouth.

"Rosalie, are you stupid? What good does crying do? Why didn't you just tell me?"

In elementary school, when Rosalie failed a math test and didn't dare go home, she hid under the slide in the park wiping her eyes.

Drew looked for her half the night and came away covered in mosquito bites.

When he finally found her, he was angry enough to hit someone, but the hand he raised only flicked her lightly on the forehead in the end.

"Total idiot. I'll teach you from now on. Cry again and I'll leave you here for the mosquitoes."

And he did teach her, for a whole lifetime. He taught her how to work problems, how to ride a bike, how to protect her face first in a fight.

The only thing he never taught her was how to face him leaving.

Rosalie closed the box of wrappers back up and dropped it into the trash.

A single clack. The sound of her youth hitting the bottom.

Tilda Hughes called right then, her voice loud enough to punch through an eardrum.

"Rosalie! That dog of a man really didn't come see you off? Does he have a heart at all? Twenty-some years together. You'd feel something even for a dog you raised that long!"

Rosalie laughed, and it was worse to look at than crying.

"Tilda, stop cursing him. Let's just part on good terms."

"Good terms my ass! I don't believe he actually stopped caring. Last month he still drove all over the city in the middle of the night just to buy you that chicken dumpling soup you love. How does that turn into 'no feelings left' out of nowhere?"

Right. How did it turn into no feelings, out of nowhere?

Rosalie couldn't work it out either.

The same way she couldn't work out why the man who used to tuck her cold hands into his own armpits to warm them up in winter would look at her, on the day of the divorce, with those stranger's eyes, and say: "Rosalie, I'm bored of you."

Maybe that was just the adult world. Not so many whys, only outcomes.

Rosalie dragged her suitcase out through the front gate, rain hitting her face, no telling anymore what was rain and what wasn't.

She didn't look back, because she was afraid that if she did, she'd see the figure standing behind the second-floor curtain.

And more afraid to see that the figure wasn't there at all.