The market had been loud and full of life. As Aris
remembered it.
But her mind was not on the ceremony. It was on the children.
She had seen them in the market, two pups chasing each other between the stalls. The boy fell and scraped his knee. Before he could cry, his mother scooped him up. She kissed his forehead. She whispered something that made him laugh through his tears.
Aria had stopped in the middle of the crowd, watching, and felt something crack open inside her chest.
She had never been that child. Never been scooped up. Never been kissed. Never been told that her tears mattered.
She sat on the edge of her mattress and turned the stone over in her fingers.
Her mind went back to seven years ago, when she sat beneath an old oak tree, hearing the truth about her birth for the
