Page 64 of The Ashes of Summer

His fingers hover over the contents before they settle on a photograph, and he lifts it the way you'd lift something holy—like it might come apart in his hands. Its edges have worn pale, the colors faded almost to sepia, but I can make out a woman's face and dark hair spilling loose down her back. A crease runs straight down the middle, the paper split where it's been folded and unfolded so many times the fibers finally give.

A small smile touches his mouth despite the damage, and it changes his entire face. For one disorienting second, I catch a glimpse of the man he might have been, before whatever happened to him happened—and it frightens me more than his anger ever has. Because I understand his anger. I know what it wants. I can't read him at all.

Monsters make sense. It's the broken ones you can't predict.

"She hated this picture."

His voice is so quiet I almost don't catch it. I don't answer. I'm not sure the words were meant for me at all.

"Spent twenty minutes complaining about it." A soft laugh escapes him, and the sound doesn't belong in this room, doesn't belong anywhere near the man I've come to know. "She said it made her nose look crooked."

His thumb moves across the image. Once. Twice. The smile lingers.

Then he looks up, and everything shifts.

His gaze goes from the photograph to me. Back to the photograph. Then back to me again. The smile fades—not into anger this time, but into something worse. Concentration. He's comparing. Measuring me against her, hunting for the places we line up, searching for pieces of a dead woman hidden somewhere beneath my skin. Under the weight of it I feel like a specimen laid out on glass, and I have to fight the urge to fold my arms across myself.

"You're thinner."

The words catch me completely off guard. "What?"

"Than she was." His tone stays thoughtful. Mild. As though it's the most natural thing in the world to lay a stranger down beside a ghost and find her lacking. His eyes travel over me again, assessing, tallying. "You'll have to eat more."

My mouth goes dry.

He turns back to the photograph, and just like that the conversation is over—if it was ever a conversation, and not just me sitting in the path of one he's having with someone who isn't here. Because that's the thing I'm starting to understand. He isn't talking to me.

He's talking to a memory.

I just happen to be in the room while he does it.

The thought slides through me, cold and clarifying, and I can't yet tell whether it's the most dangerous thing I've realized since I got here or the first thing that might keep me alive.

He reaches into the box again and draws out the perfume bottle, and the second his fingers close around it, something in his whole face softens.

Not for me.

For her.

The difference matters. It's a terrible, vital thing to understand, and I hold onto it like a handrail.

"She loved this." A sad smile. "Used to complain about how expensive it was." His fingers tighten a fraction around the glass. "But she'd always buy another bottle."

He lifts it and sprays once into the air, then leans back into the falling mist and breathes it in—and I watch him leave. Watch him step out of this room and into another one, into a whole other life. Whatever came after her—the prison, the blood, all the ruin he's built and left behind him—none of it seems to exist inside that single breath. For as long as the scent hangs in the air, he's back with her, and the years between might as well never have happened at all.

And all at once I understand the shape of him.

Jackson loved someone once, and she was taken from him, and he never healed from it. Never accepted it. Never let it settle into the past where it belonged. Part of him is still standing in the exact moment he lost her—frozen there, unable to walk out of the room.

When his eyes find mine again, the intensity in them makes me want to look away. I don't. I can't. Because I can see the cracks now—the places where the grief kept twisting until it became something else entirely. Something darker. Something that doesn't want to mourn her anymore.

It wants her back.

"You look more like her now." He says it with a quiet satisfaction that turns my stomach—the voice of a man who's finished a piece of careful work, who's mended something that was broken.

And the pieces drop into place all at once. The dark hair. The photographs. The perfume. The clothes he had laid out for me. The way he keeps looking—not at me, at her⁠—

Oh God.