Chapter 77: Two Letters
She wrote two letters the morning after.
The first to her mother.
She sat at her desk in the early light with the ring on her hand and the specific quality of the morning around her, the particular settledness of a day after a significant thing when the significant thing has been absorbed into the body and is simply part of what is now true.
She wrote the letter the way she wrote everything now, without management and without arrangement, with the honest and direct language of a woman who had stopped performing her own life for an audience.
Mama. Alaric asked me to be his mate formally. I said yes. I want you to know that I said it from myself. From the woman I am now, who is not the woman you prepared and not the woman who was broken in the citadel's beautiful
