KNOX’S POV
She turns and walks back up the path toward the house, and the lights are on — warm yellow through old windows, the house glowing against the Swiss dusk like somewhere people lived and loved and were happy, which is the cruelest lie a house can tell.
I glance toward the cemetery. Rayana is still at her mother’s grave, lost in her own grief. She doesn’t know what I’m holding. She doesn’t know what I’m about to walk into.
I walk toward the house, and for a moment, it feels like being transported to a older time, not by any chance a simpler one, but one where I at least had a family.
The front door opens the way it always did — a slight resistance in the hinges that my father never fixed.
The kitchen is to the left. I don’t go in.
I can see it from the hallway — the counter w
