The fragile peace was a performance, and Nora was its lead actress. She smiled at breakfast, discussed foundation budgets with Demetri, and encouraged Sasha’s art, all while the lie sat in her stomach like a shard of glass, twisting with every movement. Demetri, unburdened by the horrific truth, began to truly *see* his daughter. He saw not a problem, but a legacy. He saw Anya’s artistic soul tempered by his own relentless will. The shared, painful secret of the forged birth certificate had created a strange, new bond between them—a bond built on the fiction Nora had crafted.
It was during one of their new, tentative art sessions—Demetri critiquing Sasha’s use of shadow in a charcoal sketch of the city—that the first crack in Nora’s carefully constructed world appeared.
Sasha, emboldened
