Mara came to her room at two in the afternoon.
Selene had spent the morning the way she had told Damien she would spend it, not alright in the specific and intentional way of someone who had given themselves permission to feel the full weight of a thing before they picked it back up and carried it forward. She had sat with her mother's name in the green notebook and the photograph still vivid in her memory and the particular grief of knowing precisely who had ordered the end of everything that should have been her life before Crescent Moon and silent rooms and eighteen years of not knowing what she was.
She had cried once. Not for long. She was not a person who cried easily or at length, the same way she was not a person who spoke easily or at length, both things the result of the same l
