For weeks, I had told myself he was a stranger. An anomaly. A force of power who simply existed in my present because the universe had twisted cruelly enough to place him here.

But I had been wrong.

I had known him. Somewhere in the fog of my other life, he had existed. I had carried the faint ache of his death without understanding why, like a note struck once and left to echo long after the music ended.

And now the truth pressed down on me like a weight I couldn’t shake: I wasn’t ...