Chapter 1

I went to the cemetery with my best friend's fiancé.

Sebastian carried a bunch of white lilies in both arms and laid them carefully against Nina's headstone.

His eyes were red. His voice cracked when he spoke.

"We were so close to getting married. You were laughing just a few days before — you said the wedding bouquet had to be lilies, that you wanted to be surrounded by them on the day. You said you wanted to spend your whole life with me."

"And then one accident, and everything was gone. Nina, I'm sorry. If there's another life, I'll spend every second of it keeping you safe."

My hands went cold the moment I heard it.

No one knew better than I did: the one flower Nina absolutely could not be near was a lily.

She had a sensitivity condition — a mild rhinitis that usually left her indifferent to most plants and flowers, but with lily pollen, the reaction was severe. Even a trace of it in the air would tighten her throat, raise hives on her skin. In bad cases, she could barely breathe.

There was no version of Nina Sterling who wanted to be surrounded by lilies on her wedding day.

Nina had died in a hit-and-run two months ago.

By the time I reached the scene, there was nothing left but wreckage. The way she'd been treated after she was struck — I managed one look and had to crouch by the roadside, shaking so badly I couldn't stand. That was Nina. Nina, who felt every paper cut. I couldn't bear to think about what she'd endured.

Sebastian arrived later and fell apart.

He pushed through the police cordon. When he saw what was on the ground, he went rigid. Then his knees gave out. He grabbed a police officer's arm and kept saying the same thing over and over — It can't be her. Tell me you've got the wrong person. Please, tell me you're wrong.

When the officer confirmed the identification, he vomited blood.

When he saw the body the forensic team had pieced together, he collapsed completely. He cried until he couldn't breathe, then passed out, then came around and did it again, several times. By morning his face had caved in — hollow cheekbones, dark circles, stubble overnight, every bit of colour gone. His eyes, which had always been clear, had gone entirely dark.

The story went viral within days. The whole country was furious, calling for the driver to be found and prosecuted. But the CCTV on that stretch of road had been broken for months and no one had bothered to fix it, and the rainstorm that night had washed the scene clean of everything. Every lead dried up.

Yesterday, the police officially suspended the investigation. Two months of searching, and they had nothing.

Sebastian loaded more lilies out of the boot of his car and arranged them in a ring around the headstone. A field of white, deliberately, painstakingly composed.

He straightened up and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

"Do you think she'd like this?" he asked.

He had the look of someone who genuinely believed it — that particular kind of desperate sincerity that made you feel unsettled, not reassured.

I looked away. "I don't know."

He nodded, and turned back to the stone.

"It's all right. I made her a promise. I told her I'd say I love you to her in the flowers she loved most." His voice went very quiet. "I'm just keeping my word."

Tears slid down his hollowed face and caught on the lily petals beneath.

I watched him and felt my stomach turn.

He and Nina had met at a social event in their second year at university. Nina had grown up with a lot of care, kept sheltered — she was open and trusting in a way that made her easy to hurt. Sebastian had taken considerable trouble with her: breakfast, snacks, showing up in the rain with an umbrella, knowing her cycle better than she did and having painkillers and a heat pack at the ready. Nina hadn't stood a chance. She used to squeeze my arm and whisper: He's different, Mia. He actually understands me.

Six years together, and he'd never put a foot wrong. He drove an hour at midnight to get a specific cake she'd mentioned in passing. He spent whole evenings coaxing her down after difficult days at work. He remembered every anniversary, never missed a gift, and looked at her with an attention that never varied.

There were times I genuinely thought she was one of the lucky ones.

After Nina died, Sebastian more or less stopped existing. He gave up the flat they'd renovated together and rented a small room near the police station — so he'd be the first to know if anything came in. He barely ate; I kept forcing food on him. He stopped going to work. Every hour he had, he spent chasing the case.

He kept a thick notebook on him at all times, stuffed with photographs from the scene, maps, handwritten timelines, printed search results. The edges were worn through. He'd been to the traffic division so many times that every officer there knew him by sight, and they'd started looking at him with the particular combination of pity and helplessness that people reserve for someone they can't do anything for.

He wouldn't interrupt the investigation, so instead he'd sit quietly in the corridor on a bench and wait for hours, just watching, just being there.

He'd gone door to door across a five-kilometre radius of the accident site — residential streets, shops, petrol stations, mechanics — stopping everyone he could, bowing ninety degrees, repeating: Please. Think carefully. Did you notice anything unusual that night? Any detail at all. I'm begging you.

He'd opened a social media account called Finding the Truth for Nina Sterling and posted only photographs and videos of Nina, updates on his search, and detailed reconstructions of the case timeline.

Two months of this. He moved through the city like a ghost that couldn't feel pain — driven by a single, fixed point: find who did it.