I did not sleep well that night.
I lay in the dark of my rooms with my hand resting against the curve of my stomach, turning Damien's words over the way I turned over everything difficult, slowly, from every angle, refusing to let myself settle into the comfortable version of them before I had examined the true one.
I will burn every alliance I have to the ground. He had not said it as romance. He had said it the way he said everything that mattered, plainly, without performance, the specific honesty of a man who did not know how to soften a true thing and had stopped trying to.
I understood, lying there in the dark, that I had spent my entire life being told, in a hundred careful and uncareful ways, that I was a liability to be managed, an inconvenience to be minimized, a cost that som
