The whisper came from the corridor at 12:17.
“Mason.”
He opened his eyes to darkness and the taste of iron on his tongue. For several seconds he lay perfectly still on the narrow mattress, listening to Blackthorn Prison breathe around him: pipes knocking inside the walls, rain ticking against the high window, someone coughing three cells down. The sound had been so soft he might have mistaken it for a dream.
“Mason.”
This time, the voice carried beneath his door.
He pushed himself upright. Cold air slid beneath the blanket and raised gooseflesh along his arms. The cell was a concrete box washed in gray moonlight, its toilet crouched in one corner, its steel sink glinting beside the bunk. On the wall opposite him, four black lines marked the days since his last visit from the chaplain. He had stopped counting the years long ago. Four years since Courtney. Two since the trial. Eight months since the transfer to Blackthorn.
No one visited anymore.
Not his mother, who had mailed one photograph of herself standing beside a gravestone and never written again. Not the Maguires, who sat behind him at sentencing with faces like locked doors. Not the reporters who once crowded the courthouse steps, shouting questions about rage, obsession, and the river.
Mason swung his feet onto the floor.
“Who’s there?” he called.
His voice sounded small, swallowed by the concrete. He stood, gripping the edge of the bunk until the dizziness passed, then crossed to the bars. The corridor beyond was empty from end to end, a long tunnel of doors and shadow. One fluorescent tube flickered above the far stairwell, buzzing like an insect trapped in glass.
He told himself it was a guard making rounds. A prank. A prisoner whispering through the vents.
He told himself many things at night.
He stepped closer to the bars, and the smell of river water reached him—muddy, green, and cold enough to hurt his lungs.
“Courtney?”
The lights went out.
When they returned, she was standing beneath them.
She had not been there a heartbeat earlier. Mason jerked backward, striking the sink with his hip, but Courtney Maguire did not move. She stood barefoot in the center of the corridor, her pale dress clinging to her body as if she had just climbed from deep water. Wet strands of brown hair lay across her cheeks. Water gathered at the hem and fell in slow drops onto the concrete.
One.
Two.
Three.
Her throat was dark with bruising.
Mason’s knees weakened. He caught the bars and held on, staring at the face he had seen in newspapers, photographs, nightmares. Courtney had been twenty-four when she died. In the picture the prosecutor showed the jury, she was laughing beside a birthday cake, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the flash. Now her lips were blue, and river silt streaked one cheek.
“You’re not here,” Mason whispered.
Her head tilted.
“You said that before.”
The corridor seemed to narrow around her. Mason could hear the rain again, though the window in his cell was sealed and the storm lay beyond three layers of stone. He remembered the night Courtney came to the house on Alder Road, remembered the hard slap of the screen door, the whiskey burning his throat, her voice saying she was finished with him.
He remembered grabbing her arm.
He remembered the river.
“I didn’t murder you,” he said.
Courtney lifted one hand. Water streamed from her fingers. “You always choose the gentlest word.”
“I didn’t—”
“You pushed me.”
The words did not come from her mouth. They came from the walls, the floor, the pipes overhead. They rolled through the cellblock until every door seemed to shudder with them.
Mason pressed his forehead against the bars. “It was an accident.”
Courtney took one barefoot step forward.
The slap of her wet foot against the concrete echoed like a gunshot.
He stumbled back. His heart hammered so violently that his vision pulsed. “You came at me. You wouldn’t listen. You kept threatening to tell everyone—”
“To tell them what?”
“That you wouldn’t leave me alone.”
Her eyes were the same gray-blue they had been in life, but something moved behind them now, something deep and black and patient. Mason smelled crushed reeds. He saw, for an instant, the riverbank under a white moon, Courtney’s hand clawing at the mud while his fingers slipped from her wrist.
He had told the police she fell.
He had told the jury he reached for her.
He had never told anyone about the sound her head made when it struck the stone.
Courtney came closer. Water pooled beneath her feet, spreading toward his cell in thin, shining threads. Mason backed into the bunk, shaking his head.
“I was angry,” he said. “That’s all. It was one moment. One moment of madness.”
“You had four years.”
Her voice was suddenly beside his ear.
Mason spun around.
No one stood behind him. The cell door remained locked. The toilet, sink, and bunk were exactly where they had always been. Yet something cold brushed the side of his neck, leaving a line of wetness beneath his jaw.
He screamed.
The sound brought fists against the neighboring walls.
“Bridges!” someone shouted. “Shut the hell up!”
“Guard!” Mason lunged for the bars. “Guard!”
At the far end of the corridor, Courtney stood beneath the flickering light again. Her dress dripped steadily. Her bruised throat flexed as though she were swallowing something bitter.
“Look at what you left me,” she said.
“What do you want?”
Her gaze dropped to the mattress behind him.
Mason followed it.
The blanket lay in a heap. The mattress beneath was bare, its stained fabric pale in the weak light. For one impossible second, he saw a dark crescent cut into its surface, curved like a fingernail dragged through flesh.
Then the light flickered.
Courtney vanished.