THE DEPARTURE
The bus station was fluorescent-lit and smelled of diesel and the particular despair of people leaving places they had failed to save. Sophia sat on a molded plastic bench, her two suitcases arranged beside her like sentinels, her sketchbook on her lap open to a page she wasn't drawing on.
She had not slept. The conversation with Damien in his office, the boundaries she had set, the opportunity she had offered—they felt like artifacts from another life, a person she had been before the pregnancy test, before the calculation of survival, before the recognition that staying meant becoming visible to enemies who had already demonstrated their willingness to destroy her.
Maggie had cried when Sophia told her. Not dramatic tears, not protestations, just the quiet weeping of a
