Chapter Twenty-Six: Nova
She woke up on a Tuesday and decided to go out alone. Not Aaron. Not Shawn. Not the specific comfortable dynamic that had developed between the three of them that she genuinely valued and also occasionally needed to step outside of — needed the breathing room of being just herself, just Elara, without the weight of anyone else's awareness of her grief or her recovery or the ring on her finger or the bond in her chest. Just herself. Downtown. Coffee. She stood at the kitchen table and thought about this for approximately thirty seconds and then picked up the keys. Jace's keys. His car had been sitting outside the house since April — she hadn't moved it, hadn't been able to move it, had walked past it every day for months the way you walked past things that were too loaded to look at
- Writer
