Chapter Twenty-Seven: Banned
Almost a year. She counted it without meaning to — the specific automatic arithmetic that grief produced, the calendar that ran in the background of everything else and surfaced its totals at unexpected moments. Eleven months since a forest. Eleven months since rain on his face and I'm never coming back and a bond going thin and then silent. Almost a year. She had survived it. That was the thing she'd started telling herself in the mornings now — not as comfort exactly, more as fact, the specific load-bearing fact that got her through days that still occasionally produced the kind of ache that made breathing feel deliberate. I survived it. Most days she believed it. Some days she pretended to. She had gotten very good at the difference being invisible from the outside. Nova had be
- Writer
