Iris’s POV
The next day, I woke up with a strange kind of clarity sitting quietly in my chest.The kind that settles in after you have already crossed a line and realise there is no point pretending you are still standing safely behind it.
I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling, replaying the night before in parts that refused to stay buried. Marcus’s arms around me, the way he smiled when he talked about his father and the way I smiled back like none of it touched me.
That was the part that unsettled me. Instead of drowning in guilt, I felt like something inside me had shifted and decided it was done apologising for surviving.
By the time I met Maya later that morning, I had already slipped into that version of myself.
The one who knew exactly what she was doing and refused
