It was not the sharp fear of danger, the kind that makes you run.

It was a slow, vertiginous dropping, the sensation of the solid ground of three years of your life turning to water beneath you all at once.

Everything I thought I knew, the death, the grave, the mourning, the healing, the wedding I stood inside of that very night, all of it depended on one fact, that Santiago was dead, and here on the hip of my new husband was a scar that whispered that the fact was false.

If the scar was real, then nothing was.