He went inside.
The doors closed behind him.
And I stayed on the gravel.
I don’t know how long I stayed on the ground, lying there but nobody came for me. The courtyard was completely empty and silent and I just stayed there on my hands and knees with blood dripping from my lip onto the ground beneath me and the cold seeping through my dress.
My mother was dead. The truth was slowly settling into my consciousness.
My mother… not the woman upstairs in her room with her expensive perfume and her cold eyes and her hand that had slapped me at the banquet.
No, that woman was alive. That woman was Elara’s mother, and she had never been mine. I understood now—with a clarity that should have come years ago—why she had always looked at me the way she did. Not with cruelty exactly but with t
