Escaping My Mother's Afterlife

Driven to suicide by her mother's suffocating control, Serenity expects death to bring remorse. Instead, she watches from the afterlife as her mother pays an occult medium to keep her under surveillance even in the Netherworld, burning exactly twenty Spirit Dollars a day for her—the same meager allowance she received while alive.

Surviving among the dead is far costlier than the living imagine: crypt leases, Reaper protection fees, and soul painkillers for the agony of her final fall. With twenty Spirit Dollars, Serenity can barely suppress her pain, let alone find shelter. Branded a Self-Destructive Soul, she is refused work everywhere she turns.

Her only hope is a Dream Visitation—a chance to face the mother she fled. But when she slips into her mother's dream, she finds an icy prison of order, filled with obedient copies of herself, and her mother's sharp eyes turning toward her.