“What did they write?” she asked.
I looked away.
“Destiny.”
I pressed my lips together, but the words were already there. Burning behind my teeth.
“They wrote whore across her name.” My eyes stung. “And underneath it, on the stone, they wrote like mother, like daughter.”
Regan’s face changed.
Not into pity.
Something sharper.
For a second, she looked exactly like the kind of woman who had survived loving dangerous men and had never quite forgiven the world for making that necessary.
“Who saw it?” she asked.
“Dylan.”
Her gaze flicked over me.
Of course she heard what I didn’t say.
“And?”
“I tried to clean it off.” My voice cracked despite my best effort. “With my sleeve. Like an idiot. Like if I rubbed hard enough, I could make it not be there. But it just smeared. The red got on my hands.”
I looked down at them like it might still be there.
It wasn’t.
Dylan had washed it off when we got back. Quietly. Carefully. Like he knew soap could remove paint but not the words underneath it.
Regan reached over and covered my hand with hers.
“That wasn’t yours to carry,” she said.
“It had my name in it.”
“No.” Her voice sharpened. “It had someone else’s poison in it.”
My throat closed.
“I hated seeing it,” I whispered. “I thought I was going there to make peace with her. Or say goodbye. Or be angry. I don’t even know. But then I saw that, and all I could think was that people still hate her so much they couldn’t even leave her grave alone.”
Regan’s fingers tightened around mine.
“They hated her,” I said. “And then they looked at me and decided I was just another version of her.”
“You’re not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
