After that, I lived the way the newly drowned do when someone drags them back to shore against their will. Half-present. Crying through entire nights. Pressing my thumb against the inside of my wrist in the dark just to feel my own pulse and remember I had promised to stay. I believed the rest of my life would pass exactly this way.
Until the afternoon I heard voices I was not meant to hear.
I had come to the rear study of the Moretti compound looking for a document. The door was ajar. Two men were speaking on the other side, and the first voice stopped me cold because it belonged to a dead man's brother.
"Julian, the one who died in that wreck was your younger brother. You know that. I know that. You took his name, you took his place, and you've been living as him ever since, all so you could stay close to your brother's wife. Doesn't it keep you up at night? The truth getting out?"
The second voice was quieter. Controlled. The kind of quiet that costs something.