Sienna's POV
My mother's confession settles into my body like something physical, heavy and cold, finally making sense of a feeling I've carried since I was old enough to notice the way the Sterling name made her voice go tight. Even as a child, I remember how her shoulders would stiffen whenever someone dropped that name at a dinner party, how her smile would snap into something brittle and rehearsed, a mask she'd perfected long before I was born. I never understood it then. I only knew that something ancient lived beneath her composure, something she guarded with a vigilance that felt, even to a young girl, like grief dressed up in Chanel.
This isn't a curse. I understand that now, sitting here in the wreckage of twenty six years of careful silence, watching the woman who raised me fin
