CELESTE’S POV
I hadn’t had much experience with guilt, but I quickly learned that it had a way of surfacing when least expected, creeping in through cracks I hadn’t known existed.
Also, it had a face.
Olivia’s.
The dreams started the night I met Mireya.
She didn’t come to me the way I remembered her at the end—not broken, not bloodied, not collapsing under the weight of a choice that should never have been hers to make.
Olivia—alive, untouched by the way things had ended—appeared in fragments that didn’t feel like memories so much as reminders.
Not of what had happened, but of what hadn’t been finished.
All she’d wanted was to find her sister. She’d taken care of me because she thought I could help her reach that goal.
And I’d gotten her killed.
The least I could have done was fulfill her dying dream, right?
But even that, I couldn’t do.
It wasn’t me who found Mireya.
It had been Sera. The one person I had spent years resenting.
