He walked her back to her room in silence and said goodnight without looking at her. She lay awake until dawn, replaying the words. Unless you mean it. Her wrist still tingled where his fingers had closed, and the worst part, the part she could not forgive, was how badly she had wanted to touch the scar a second time.
By morning she had made a decision. Two days left, two days of being polite to a house that could not decide whether she was a guest or a prisoner, of lying in a stranger’s bed and listening to a stranger’s heartbeat inside her own chest. She needed air. She needed her own four walls. She needed to stand in her own kitchen and prove she still existed.
The garden lay behind the east wing, a ruin of frosted roses and mossy statues enclosed by a stone wall twice her height. At
