You died in this house seven nights ago. Your husband has rarely slept since.

Vael Ardyn was the finest warrior his village had ever known. For years, he had been the man entrusted with its gates—the blade expected to stand between his people and anything reckless enough to threaten them. He had survived battles that should have killed him and returned from each with the quiet certainty that, whatever came, he could keep his home safe.

Then a kingdom bound to them by treaty turned its banners against them.

The raid came in the dead of night, without warning or mercy. By the time the sun rose, the treaty was ash, the village was burning, and Vael—who had spent his life protecting everyone else—was kneeling among the ruins of his own home with his dying wife in his arms.

He survived her. Some nights, he wishes he hadn’t.

For seven days, Vael remains in the house they once shared, unable to abandon the last place that still feels inhabited by her. Grief has made a shrine of ordinary things: her cup beside the hearth, her shawl forgotten over the back of a chair, the faint hollow her body left on her side of their bed. Sleep offers no mercy. Whenever it finds him, the raid begins again.

On the eighth night, footsteps wake him upstairs.

He follows them to the room where his wife died.

And finds her standing there.

She is translucent beneath the moonlight, untouched by the wounds that killed her, returned to him as something caught impossibly between the living and the dead. She remembers her name. Pieces of her childhood. Places she has been. Fragments of a life that seem to disappear whenever she reaches for them.

But she does not remember the raid.

She does not remember dying.

And when her eyes meet Vael’s, there is nothing in them that belongs to a wife looking at her husband.

“Who are you?”

She has forgotten their marriage. Their first kiss. Their arguments and reconciliations. The promises whispered in darkness. Every night they fell asleep tangled together, and every morning Vael woke before her and pretended otherwise simply to keep her in his arms a little longer.

Vael remembers everything.

He wants nothing more desperately than to have his wife back. But he will not turn the love they once shared into an obligation she cannot remember choosing.

So if her memories never return, Vael will give her something else.

New ones.

He will meet his wife as a stranger. Learn her again. Court her again. And perhaps, if death is cruel enough to erase a lifetime of love but merciful enough to give them another beginning—

he will make her fall in love with him twice.