Josiah
The night was a predator that refused to release me.
I sat alone in my study, the fire reduced to little more than a skeletal glow, and the silence pressing down like a stone on my chest. Sleep would not come. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Mia’s face, her eyes hardened with indifference as she walked away from me. I called her name, and she did not even turn her head. She clung to the twins as if they were her whole world, and perhaps they were.
She had been mine once, and I had destroyed her with my blindness.
The hairpin glimmered on my desk like a shard of memory, a cruel reminder of my folly. I picked it up, the pearls cold against my palm. That night, my darkest night, I had been broken, bloodied, slipping into unconsciousness, waiting for death. And before the world w
