“It’s autumn now, Mark,” I said, my voice empty of anger, empty of love, empty of everything but plain fact. “It’s time to pay the price.”

“Claire, please, I’m begging—”

I tapped the red icon. The line went dead. I popped the back off the phone, pulled the old SIM card that still tied me to that life, and dropped it into a trash bin.

I took the little wooden music box from my coat pocket — Harrison had removed the recorder, leaving only the box.

I wound it once and set it at the base of the headstone beside a fresh bouquet of purple gentians, and this time the lullaby played, thin and sweet, into the coastal wind.

Vivian had loved a monster enough to raise him, and loved the truth enough to end him. She had chosen, in the end, the person who actually stayed. That was the whole of it.