ALEXANDER
I am losing my mind.
The room isn’t large enough for what’s happening inside me. I pace its length anyway — back and forth, back and forth — my boots loud against the floor, my hands moving from my hair to my jaw to my sides and back again like they can’t settle, like my body is trying to outrun the thing my mind keeps returning to.
She was pregnant.
She was carrying my child when I stood on that dais and delivered her sentence with a steady voice and a still face and every ounce of control I have spent my entire life cultivating.
She was carrying my child when the chains went on her wrists.
When the gates closed behind her.
When I let them.
The thought moves through me like something tearing — slow and catastrophic, the way structural damage works, the way a thing holds
