I had.
And I had despised myself.
But as I held Zara now, with Fraysa’s veil wrapping around us like starlight spun into silk, it happened. I realized that I was remembering things. Not the vague flickers I’d come to know since my return. Not dreams or emotions without shape. These were clear. Sharp. Anchored.
I remembered.
I remembered sitting in the nursery in the dead of night, holding Myccael while he slept and silently weeping, because the guilt was too loud to quiet. I remembered Mallack, trying so hard to reach me. To soothe me. But I wouldn’t let him. I couldn’t let him. Because every time I looked at him, I saw everything we had lost. I felt like I had let him down. I wallowed in my guilt, swamped with a grief I couldn't describe. I remembered the moments I’d stood in front of the mirror, wondering where the fire in me had gone.
How I had faded from myself.
How I had smiled in public and screamed in silence.
I remembered lying in bed one night, staring at the ceiling, thinking,This isn’t the life I was supposed to live.
And finally—I remembered my last breath.
The coolness. The stillness. Theresignation.Not fear. Not pain.
Just a cessation of the endless ache that never had a name.
Until now.
Now I knew what it had been.
It had been me—missing.
The woman I had been, the one who had loved fiercely and fought louder, had died long before her body followed. And no one had noticed. Not even me.
Until this moment.
Until this baby.
This daughter.
This line of blood and soul that connected everything I thought I had lost.
I wasn’t just remembering.
I wasreturning.
And this time, I wasn’t going to leave myself behind.
And now… here in this room, with a child nestled against my heart—a child whose heartbeat echoed something ancient and real—I finally understood what that ache had meant. It wasn’t that I couldn’t love Myccael.
I did.
I do.
But he hadn’t comefromme. Not in the way Zara had come from Thalia. Not in the way Mallack and I had once been meant to bring life into the world together. He was my son in bond. In name. In blood passed through other hands. But not in spirit.
And oh, gods, it hurt.
It hurt to know I had missed this.
That I had been denied this.
That someone had taken thisknowing, this soul-deep recognition, from me—and left me with a memory stitched together with silence and guilt.
