I didn't sleep. I'd stopped pretending I would sometime around two in the morning, when I gave up on the bed and moved to the chair by the window Sera kept accusing me of choosing because it had a clean line of sight to the street, which was true, and which I'd stopped being embarrassed about.
By the time the sky started going gray, I'd read my father's letter twice more and my mother's once, and I still didn't have anything close to what a word like Warden meant sitting inside my chest like a stone I hadn't asked for.
Sera found me there a little after six, wrapped in a blanket that used to be Cole's, judging by the smell of cedar still on it.
"You look like you didn't get any sleep." she said, not unkindly, setting a mug of tea on the windowsill beside me.
"I barely did." I wrapped m
