Elara's POV
I went to Kairo the morning after.
Not immediately after breakfast, not with the urgency of someone who had made a decision and needed to tell it. I went the way I went to Kairo most mornings, at the unhurried pace of someone walking a route they knew well enough not to think about, through the lane and off it and down the shorter road with its familiar shapes, the Aldren fence, the gap in the hedge where children had been cutting through for as long as anyone could remember, the window box with its flowers that Kairo tended the way she tended everything, quietly and without making a show of it.
I had the document with me.
I had not told my mother I was taking it. I had simply folded it along its creases that morning, while the house was still at the particular half-awake s
