Anya sat down beside her, leaving a careful foot of space. “Your brother’s losing his mind.”

Mira finally looked at her. Up close, she was older than the photograph—mid-thirties, with crow’s feet that looked earned, not aged. “Because getting better is exhausting. And you… you said something on the bridge that night. You said, ‘The world doesn’t need you to be fixed. It needs you to be honest.’ So I’m being honest. I don’t want to be saved again. I want to be seen.”

Anya didn’t recognize him. But she recognized the weight of forgotten connection—how it could pull you under like a riptide.

She froze. Three months ago, on the Brooklyn Bridge at 2 a.m., she had talked a stranger down from the rail. A woman in a red coat who smelled like rain and cheap rosé. Anya had said strange things that night—things she didn’t remember planning: “Your death doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to everyone who’s ever loved you wrong.” The woman had stepped back. Anya had walked her to a diner, bought her coffee, and left before the ambulance arrived.

And there, sitting on the ledge, was Mira. Red coat, even in July.

Anya never told anyone. Not her mother, not her therapist. Not even her cat, Ptolemy, who knew everything else.

Anya’s thumb twitched. That scar was from a broken vase at age nine.