EMBER’S POV

His jaw works, and then he nods.

The scale glows and reaches into me, and I feel it lift the whole rot of Gale out — years of terror and grinding and a white hospital ceiling, flashes after flashes, of violence and blood and cruel words and down to the sex with Logan — and then there’s a smooth blank place where he lived, and I know only, the way you know a fact about a stranger, that I was married once, and it was bad, and I left.

The details of it are gone. And it doesn’t hurt at all.

The light of the scale dies down,...