The Morning I Already Buried

Here is a thing I have learned about coming back from the dead, which I offer freely to anyone it may concern. You spend the first hour absolutely certain you have lost your mind, and the second hour absolutely certain you have not, and somewhere in the third hour you stop caring which it is, because either way there is work to do.

I gave myself the first hour. I think I had earned it. I lay in the bed above the bakery and shook, properly, the way you shake after a near miss, except the near miss was an entire murdered life. I cried, which I do not do, and which I will be denying if anyone asks. I said sorry out loud, three times, to no one, which makes no sense, because the only person I had to apologise to was lying dead on a tablecloth three years from now in a future that had just been cancelled. It took me a long minute to understand that the person I was grieving was not in that marquee at all. It was the woman in this bed. I had failed to keep myself breathing, and now, impossibly, I was breathing anyway, and I did not yet know what that obligated me to do.

Then the hour was up, and I got out of bed, and I went to make coffee, because even the resurrected need coffee, and that was when the world told me, for the first time, that it was not going to hand me back exactly what I remembered.

I remembered this morning. I had cause to. It was the morning that started everything, and I had replayed it a thousand times in the slow weeks before the wedding, looking, the way you do, for the place where I went wrong. I remembered making coffee in this exact kitchen and, reaching for the milk, knocking the cup with my sleeve and sending it off the counter, a brown wave across the floor, and swearing, and being late, and arriving at the Mereworth flustered and pink, which is, I had always believed, why I was so easy to charm that night. I came in off-balance. Tristan righted me. It is a very effective trick if you are the sort of man who first arranges for the floor to tilt.

So this morning I reached for the milk, and my sleeve caught the cup, exactly as I remembered, and the cup went off the edge of the counter.

And I caught it.

I do not know how. I was not even trying. My hand was just there, three years younger and quicker than my mind, and it closed around the cup an inch above the tiles, not a drop spilled, and I stood there in my dead grandmother's dressing gown holding a cup of coffee that, in my memory, was already a puddle on the floor.

It sounds like nothing. I know it sounds like nothing. But I stood very still, holding that cup, and I felt the bottom drop out of something I had not even known I was standing on.

Because I had been telling myself, in that first shaking hour, a comforting story. The story was: I know exactly what happens now. I have the whole script. I know every line they will say, every flower Delphine will pick, every smile Tristan will deploy, the date and the hour and the brand of the wine. I am not a woman who has been sent back in time. I am a woman who has been handed the answer key to the most expensive exam of her life.

And the cup, sitting cool and full and entirely unspilt in my hand, said: no. The cup said, you only have the answer key as long as you give the same answers. Change one thing, even a thing this small, even a cup, and the morning is no longer the morning you remember. It is a new morning, made of the new choices, and it will go where they take it, and nobody, not even the woman who died at the end of the old one, knows where that is.

I sat down on the kitchen floor, which is not where I had planned to spend my resurrection, and I drank the coffee I had saved, and I thought about that for a while.

The honest version is that it frightened me worse than the dying had. The dying I had survived. This was worse. This was the discovery that my one advantage, the only edge a dead woman gets, was not a map at all. It was a memory of a road, and the moment I stepped off the path I had walked before, the memory went blind. Every clever thing I did to save myself would, by being clever, erase the very knowledge that let me be clever. I would spend my advantage in the act of using it. The future would close behind me like water.

A lesser woman would have decided to do nothing, then. To live the old morning exactly, step for step, and keep the map intact for as long as possible.

I want you to understand that I considered it. For about ninety seconds, on that floor, I genuinely considered walking back into that gallery flustered and pink and letting Tristan Vane right me, and marrying him again, and dying again, on schedule, just to keep my precious answer key. That is how deep it went in me, the thing Margot built, the terror of being surprised, the preference for a known catastrophe over an unknown anything. I would have died on time to avoid being late.

That is the moment I think of as the real beginning. Not the marquee. Not the bed. The kitchen floor, where I chose the unknown.

I got up. I found a pen and the back of an envelope, because I am the kind of person who, faced with the abyss, reaches first for stationery, and I wrote, at the top, in the small neat hand Margot drilled into me:

PLAN FOR NOT DYING AGAIN.

Then I wrote:

1. Do not, under any circumstances, let Tristan Vane charm me at the gallery tonight. Be cold. Be unavailable. Cut him off at the root.

I looked at that for a moment. Then I crossed it out.

Not because it was wrong, exactly. It was good strategy. A cold Ines is a hard target. But I sat there and I felt, under the strategy, the older and truer fact, which was that I did not want to be cold. I had spent three years being charming to my own murderers. I was so tired of arranging my face. The thought of walking into that room and performing a careful, calculated coldness, of managing the evening, of treating my own resurrection as one more event to control, made me want to climb back into the bed and pull the curtains that never quite met.

I had died planning. I had built a wedding like a fortress and the enemy had simply walked in the front gate I left open for them. The plan had not saved me. The plan had killed me, slowly, over three beautifully organised years.

So I crossed out item one, and under it I wrote a different thing, and it was the first genuinely free choice I had made in two lifetimes:

1. Go to the gallery. Forget Tristan. Find Roan Maddox first.

Find him before the room ever has the chance to teach me to fear him. Find him before Delphine's voice and Tristan's arm and Margot's little laugh can lay the charge. Get to the one person who ever told me the truth, and this time get there first, and look at him with the eyes of a woman who watched him try, three years running, to save her life. Hire him, befriend him, court him, I did not even know yet which, I only knew that in my last life the single thing I would change, if I could change one thing, was that I would have trusted him.

If I could do it again, I had thought, in the dark.

Well. Here was the again. Standing in the kitchen, holding it like a caught cup.

I crossed out the rest of the numbered list before I had even written it, which felt, I will admit, enormously unlike me, and which I now understand was the whole point. Then I went to get dressed, and I did not wear the green.

I wore red.

The phone buzzed again, the second reminder, the nagging one I always set for the things I might wriggle out of. I picked it up to silence it, and the screen, helpful as ever, showed me the calendar entry I had not opened yet, the one beneath the gallery reminder, sitting there at 4pm like a small black mine I had buried three years ago and forgotten I was standing on.

Coffee with Aunt Margot. Trust review. Bring the documents she asked for.

I had forgotten. In the old morning I had gone to that coffee, and signed what she put in front of me without reading it, because she was Margot and I was Ines and that was the arrangement of us. I had no memory of what I signed. I had never once, in either life, read the documents.

I stood in my red dress in the flat above the bakery and felt the second floor of the building go dark, the way it had at the wedding, except this time it was understanding coming on instead of poison.

Whatever I had signed at four o'clock that afternoon, in my last life, I had signed it three hours before I met the man who would marry me for my money.

Which meant Margot had been arranging the floor to tilt before Tristan Vane ever laid a hand on me.

I picked up my coat. I had two appointments to keep and a whole second lifetime to spend, and for the first time in either of them, I was the one who knew where the wine was poured.