ELARA POV
The house was too quiet when I came downstairs.
That was how I knew.
Not because the table was set with breakfast I hadn't asked for, or because my father was already seated when he was usually still in the fields at this hour. Not even because my mother was standing at the window with her back to the room, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she wasn't drinking.
It was the quiet. The specific, held-breath kind that meant something had already been decided before I walked in.
I paused at the bottom of the stairs.
My mother didn't turn around.
My father looked up, and the look on his face, careful, deliberate, like a man measuring the weight of every word before he spoke it, told me that whatever was coming, he had been rehearsing it.
"Sit down, sweetheart," he said.
I
