You stop with the crystal glass just short of your mouth, and the wine inside it trembles as if your hand no longer belongs to you.
Around you, the private dining room of Saint Laurent House glows with polished brass, candlelight, and the carefully curated illusion that people with enough money can keep pain outside the door. Your German partners are discussing a fifty-million-dollar pharmaceutical merger. Your attorney is sliding a fountain pen across a folder thick with clauses, percentages, and escape routes. But none of it reaches you.
Because three tables away, in the service station near the swinging kitchen doors, a ghost is scraping half-eaten salmon and untouched bread into a plastic bag hidden inside a cleaning bucket.
And the ghost has Nayeli Reyes’s face.
