Cierra:
By the time we reached the packhouse, the rain had swallowed the road whole.
Every mile between my childhood home and this place seemed to bleed into the next — the tires slicing through puddles like ghosts refusing to let go. The air was thick, heavy with mud and memory. It smelled like endings.
Neither of us spoke the entire way back.
There are no words for the kind of silence that comes after discovering your mother’s death wasn’t fate — it was someone’s choice, someone’s hand, someone’s cruelty.
The trees blurred past, skeletal against the storm, and I stared out the window until my reflection disappeared in the glass. The girl who looked back at me earlier — the one who’d wept over a truth carved into old paper — was gone. What replaced her was hollowed out, colder.
When
