Josiah
The silence was unbearable.
It pressed down like a stormcloud, thick and heavy, suffocating the air in the study. The jeweled hairpin gleamed in my hand, mocking me, each pearl whispering of a past I had never truly understood. A past I thought I knew well.
“Was it you who saved me that day?” I asked again, my voice sharp as the edge of a blade.
Agatha stood there mute, her eyes darting from me to the others, her lips trembling but offering no answer.
Now, at last, she found her voice.
“Of course it was me, Josiah,” she said, her tone carefully schooled into innocence. “Who else could it have been? I…”
I cut her off with a laugh. A harsh, bitter sound, ripped straight from my gut. Not the laugh of a man amused, but of one betrayed so deeply that he no longer knew whether t
