* Lawrence *
Her eyes pierced through me that night, the way only Jana's could. She thought I was made of stone, calculated, unfeeling, but she didn't see the fracture beneath, the part of me that had been eroding for years under the weight of her mother's ghost. She deserved to hate me. And maybe after this, she would.
I dragged a hand over my face, leaning back in my chair, though it did nothing to ease the tightness in my chest. Every second I kept this truth buried was another second of lying by omission. But if I spoke... the world we knew, the world I'd so carefully balanced between us, would come crashing down.
"You think I don't already know what it will do to you," I murmured, almost to myself. "But the truth doesn't just wound the one who asks for it, Jana. It claws at everyon
