Talia.
The word sat on the page in Ronan's careful decoding, plain and small and utterly devastating, and Aria felt something inside her chest c***k open in a way none of the last two days' revelations had managed to do. Not Cassian's neglect. Not Evelyn's engineered cruelty. Not even Corvin's calm, practiced betrayal of thirty-one years of service.
Talia, who had trained beside her in the frost-covered yard the morning everything changed. Talia, who had asked whether she'd eaten, who had leaned against the fence post with sympathy written plainly across her face, who had been — Aria had believed, had needed to believe — the one person left at Silver Dawn who still saw her as a person instead of a ghost. She thought of every small kindness across four years of friendship — a shared meal
