POV: Maya
My mother held my hands and closed her eyes. I watched her face. The concentration on it, the particular internal focus of someone doing something that required everything they had. She had explained it quickly, in the gym with everyone listening, what the second seal was and what it contained and why she had placed it. She had explained it without making excuses for any of it, which was the thing I was going to need time to process because the impulse to defend herself had clearly been there and she had put it aside deliberately.
I was going to need time for a lot of things. Right now I sat on the bleacher steps and gave her my hands and waited. The second seal broke like a window opening in a room that had been closed for years.
Not the first seal’s physical violence, not
