Elara's POV
I did not sleep the night before.
Not in the restless, turning way of someone who cannot find a comfortable position. In the other way. The still way. I lay on my back in the dark with my hands folded on my chest and my eyes open and I looked at the ceiling and I thought, and the thinking was not circular the way anxious thinking is circular, going over the same ground and finding no new purchase. It was deliberate. It was the thinking of a person who has made a decision and is now walking through it from every angle, not to find a reason to unmake it, but to be certain that when they carry it into a room they can carry it without flinching.
I had made my decision.
I had made it the night the document arrived, if I was honest, standing in the lower pack land with the first
