Ivy's POV

Two words, and I belong to my father’s murderer forever.

The priest is still talking. I’ve stopped listening. My hands are folded in front of me, the bouquet trembling but I hope no one notices and across from me, Kai Knox stands like carved marble in a black suit that costs more than my father’s funeral did.

“You could still run,” Noa whispers beside me.

A candle flickers near my soon to be husband’s sleeve as the priest shifts his weight and his hand jerks back before he catches himself, quick and controlled.

That’s not a reaction just anyone would have, that’s a man flinching from fire.

One year earlier

They bring him out on a stretcher at 1:47 in the morning and the sheet covering him is too short to reach both ends.

The air still tastes like smoke and something worse underneath it. Red and blue light sweeps across the crowd in slow, rhythmic waves, catching on wet faces and cameras held up by strangers who have no idea whose life they're filming the end of.

Somewhere behind me, a radio crackles with a voice giving coordinates I can’t seem to understand at the moment.

I don't remember deciding to run toward it. One second I'm standing behind the police tape, the next I'm shoving past a firefighter twice my size, screaming my father’s name.

I couldn’t possibly miss the glow of that signet ring on his finger peeked outside of the white cloth

"That's my father, let me see him, let me–"

"Miss, you can't be here." Hands catch my shoulders, gentle yet strong "Please, let them work."

"I need to see him."

"You don't." A woman's voice this time, low, careful.

I turn and find a fire marshal watching me with an expression I'll spend the rest of my life recognizing on other people's faces. Pity dressed up as calm. "The fire made identification difficult, Miss Marchetti. I don't think you want that to be the last image you have of him."

The word ‘difficult’ doesn't register the way it should. Nothing is registering the way it should.

She hesitates. That hesitation is the first thing that night that actually terrifies me.

"We found this on the body." She holds out a small evidence bag and inside it, blackened at the edges but still unmistakably itself, is my father's signet ring, the only recognizable thing pulled from the body.

The one he's worn on his right hand since before I was born. The one I used to spin around his finger when I was small enough to sit on his lap during phone calls, back when his biggest problem in the world was a printer that never worked.

I don't remember deciding to scream. I just hear it happening, distant and awful, like it's coming from somewhere outside my own body.

"This can’t be" I shake my head

"Miss Marchetti."

I know he wears it every day. It doesn't come off. He never let it go, even till his last breath

"I'm so sorry."

That's all it takes to end the world as I've known it for twenty-four years.

I don't know how long I stand there after that. Long enough that someone drapes a blanket over my shoulders and the flames finally start to die down behind the wreckage of a building I used to visit after school, sitting in the corner of my father's office doing homework while he took calls that always ran five minutes longer than he promised.

Noa finds me sometime after three, shoving through the crowd with a look on her face that tells me someone's already called her, already told her enough to make her run. She doesn't ask any questions. She just wraps both arms around me and holds on and I let her, because my legs are giving out

"I've got you" she says. "I've got you, V"

I don't cry. Not then. It's like grief hasn't caught up to the rest of me yet, like some part of my brain is still standing at that barricade, waiting for someone to tell me this was all some terrible mistake, that they've made an error, that any second now my father is going to walk out of that building complaining about the state of his suit.

He doesn't.

Around us, the crowd starts to thin as the worst of the fire finally dies down, leaving behind a blackened shell where four floors used to be. A paramedic offers me water. I don't take it. Someone else asks if there's a family member they can call.

Noa answers for me, I've stopped being able to form full sentences.

Behind us, two firefighters are talking low, although not quiet enough for me not to hear.

"Fire moved too fast for it to be electrical," one of them says. "Structural damage on the fourth floor's

inconsistent with the rest of the building too. Someone's going to want a closer look at this one."

I don't understand yet what that sentence means.

Noa drives me home a little after four, the ring still clutched so tightly in my fist.

The city looks wrong through the window. A man walks his dog past a closed bakery like the entire world hasn't just ended for me on this one particular street. A bus stops to let two people off. Somewhere, someone is asleep in their bed, completely unaware that anything has happened at all and I hate them for it.

At my flat, she makes me tea I don't touch and sits with me until the sun comes up over the rooftops, saying nothing because she's known me long enough to know there's nothing to say. At some point she falls asleep on the sofa, still in her coat. I don't sleep at all.

I keep opening my hand to look at the ring, half convinced that if I look hard enough, it will turn out to be someone else's. It never does. recognize it all too well.

The next few hours blur together in a way I won't fully piece back until much later. A call to my mother I don't remember making, though Noa says I was the one who dialed. A neighbor knocking with a casserole dish before eight in the morning, as if word already traveled faster than the sun came up. The particular, awful quiet of a flat that's never going to have my father walk into it again, not for Sunday lunch, not for anything.

By the time the sun is fully up, my phone has fourteen missed calls and one text message from an unknown number that stops me cold before I even open it.

Unknown Number: My condolences, Miss Marchetti. We'll need to speak soon regarding your father's final affairs

I read it three times before I set the phone face-down on the coffee table, unable to make sense of how someone I've never given my number to already knows my father is dead.

I don't know it yet but that message is the first thread of a rope that's about to wrap itself around the rest of my life.