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“Kira.” Domenico’s voice is harder now. His hand leaves my hip and finds my wrist, his fingers circling the bone. “Talk to me.”

“I need to…” The words come out thin, scraped. “I need to take this. Outside.”

Once again, the call ends but a third one follows within barely any time at all.

He follows me outside, steering me through the crowd with the efficiency of a man used to creating paths through chaos. The noise follows us—children shrieking, someone’s grandma laughing at a joke I didn’t hear, the tinny sound of fall music playing from someone’s phone speakers.

We push through the side door into the churchyard. The October air hits my face, cold and sharp, and for a second, I think it might wake me up from whatever this is. Whatever’s coming.

My thumb finds the green button. I lift the phone to my ear.

“Dr. Morgan.” My voice sounds strange to my own ears.

“Kira.” Dr. Morgan’s voice is exactly what it always is: quiet, measured, professional. “I’m calling about your mom.”

I already know what she’s going to say.

My body knew before my brain caught up, the same way animals know about earthquakes before the ground starts shaking. Something in the cadence of her voice—slower than usual, each word placed with the care of someone handling something fragile.

“Paige suffered another seizure this morning.” Dr. Morgan pauses. I can hear her breathing, the soft inhale of someone choosing her next words with surgical precision. “It was more severe than the previous ones. Her vitals became unstable. We tried everything, Kira. But her heart stopped, and we couldn’t bring her back.”

The words land. I hear them. I understand each individual syllable.

Seizure. Unstable. Heart stopped. Couldn’t bring her back.

But understanding the words is different from understanding what they mean, and what they mean hasn’t reached me yet. It’s traveling toward me slowly, the way news of a disaster travels across water, visible from a distance before the wave hits.

“I’m very sorry,” Dr. Morgan says. Her voice is gentler now, the clinical edge sanded down to something that almost sounds human. “I know this isn’t… I wish I had better news.”

Behind me, through the half-open door, the festival continues. Music. Laughter. The happy shouts of a child who’s just won a game.

The ordinary, relentless noise of people who don’t know that Mom is dead. That her heart stopped in a room at Langford Neurological Institute while her daughter was pretending the world was something that could be fixed.

“Kira, is there anyone…”

Dr. Morgan’s words disappear as the phone slips from my fingers.

It hits the stone path with a crack that seems impossibly loud, and then there’s nothing.

No sound. No feeling.

Just a vast, white numbness spreading through my chest and my limbs and my face, the kind of numbness that isn’t the absence of pain but the absence of everything, including the ability to stand up.

My knees buckle.

Domenico catches me as I go down, following me to the ground. His arms lock around my waist, and then I’m against his chest, my face pressed into his suit jacket, and his voice is in my ear saying words I can’t process.

My name, probably. Other things.

His hand cradles the back of my head, fingers tangling in my hair, and I can feel the rapid beat of his heart against my cheek.

Voices blur together. Someone—Vinny, I think—asking what happened. Donna’s softer voice, worried. Father Joseph’s measured tone cutting through the noise, taking charge the way he always does when something breaks.

But none of it matters because Mom is dead.

The words arrive finally, all at once, and they land like a building collapsing.

Mom is dead.