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Her heart banged against her chest. She watched his face fall as he told her the name. It echoed in her ears, and the blood drained from her body.

She heard Silas calling after her as she turned and ran up the stairs. She still heard him when she pressed her hand to the painting and fell forward. But her own mind echoed louder, her desperate plea a ricochet against her skull.

Please please please please please

When she landed on her hands and knees, the grass was soft under the bare skin of her palms and toes. The soft, dry sob that escaped her when she looked up was the only sound in the night.

The garden was a skeleton, picked clean to the branches.

Not a flower on a stem.

Not a surviving bud.

All of the plants she’d loved and nurtured—the plants her grandmother had placed into the soil—were gone.

Her grandmother was dead, but this . . . this was the final nail in her coffin.

Rain started in the garden, even though it shouldn’t have been able to rain. It drenched her to the bone.

She heard him before she saw him.

Silas.

“No,” he whispered.

“Leave,” she said.

“Margaret,” he started, but she stood and whipped toward him, mud in her hair flying as she did.

“Don’t say another word,” she snarled at him. “I knew better. I knew I was better off alone. And look what you’ve done. Look what you let Patrick Kerrigan’s son do. God, how did you not know?”

Silas started to speak, but she was advancing on him now.

“All that time in the pub,” she snapped, shaking her head. “How did I not see it before? He was sabotaging me the entire time.”

“Margaret, I’m so sorry,” Silas said. “I had no idea—”

“Which is worse!” Margaret shouted, hands curling into fists as she screamed at the sky. “Don’t you see how that’s worse?”

She glared at him, hatred coursing through her, as potent as lava.

“You betrayed me,” she said. “But really, that’s my own fault. I should’ve known better.”

He tried to speak, but she held up her hand.

“Leave, Silas,” she said. “We’re done.”

At first, he didn’t move. He stared at her with those blue eyes that pierced straight through her heart. There was mud splattered on his glasses, but he didn’t wipe it away. He looked at her, chest heaving.

Is your heart breaking? Margaret wanted to ask. Is your heart breaking like mine?

Because even under the hatred, she felt the fissures. She felt the lacerations ripping along the seams. She felt the tears threatening to spill out, but she kept them locked away for now. He didn’t deserve to see her cry again.

She was done with that after he’d stolen so much from her.

In the end, he said only four words before he turned and left. But they shattered her all the same.

“I’m so sorry, Margaret.”