Hazel eyes me sideways. “You’ve been broody.”
“I’m always broody.”
She snorts. “Yeah, but this is next-level bark beast existential crisis broody.”
I glance at her. “Is there a reason you’re here?”
She pulls a toad from her hoodie pocket and sets it in her lap. “I don’t trust people who sulk in sacred circles. You scare off the pixies.”
I exhale a rough laugh. “The pixies are fine.”
She shrugs. “You gonna tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“That you’re thinking about leaving.”
My jaw tenses.
Hazel nods to herself like she’s already read the answer in my silence.
“She’d let you go, you know. If you asked.”
I stare out into the trees. “That’s the problem.”
Hazel’s voice softens—too wise for her age. “You don’t think you belong outside the Grove.”
“IknowI don’t.”
“But maybe,” she says, standing slowly, “you don’t have to leave to be free.”
She walks away, toad in hand.
And I sit there, caught between root and sky, wondering if a creature made of shadow can ever live in someone else’s light without fading.
She finds me where Hazel left me—still seated in the ring, still trying to breathe like I belong.
Clara doesn’t say anything at first.
She just steps into the circle like she’s been walking this path her whole life, the hem of her cardigan brushing the moss, curls haloed by moonlight.
“I heard,” she says softly, sitting beside me.
I glance over, heart tight. “From Hazel?”
She nods. “And from the Grove.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know how to be this. Out here. In sunlight.”
“You don’t have tobeanything,” she says, fingers brushing lightly against my knuckles. “You already are.”
I swallow hard. “I was made for one purpose.”
“You were made,” she says, “and then you lived. That’s not the same thing.”
I go still.
Her fingers slip fully into mine.
