I tried to stop them. I really did. I blinked fast and looked down and pressed my lips together until they hurt, but it didn’t matter. They slipped over anyway, hot and silent.
Regan touched my shoulder.
Tarak looked away like the ocean needed guarding.
Amber openly cried and did not even pretend otherwise.
Edge crouched in front of me.
That almost ruined me more than the ring.
A man like Edge did not crouch often. He didn’t lower himself unless he was checking a tire, cleaning blood off a boot, or making sure someone understood a threat from eye level.
But now he crouched in front of me on my eighteenth birthday and took the turquoise ring from the box.
He held it out on his palm.
He did not put it on me.
He let me choose.
So I took it.
My hand shook as I slid it onto my right hand. It fit almost perfectly. A tiny bit loose, but not enough to fall. The turquoise caught the candlelight, glowing soft and strange against my skin.
Then I touched the diamond studs in my ears.
Something shifted.
Not fixed.
Not healed.
Shifted.
I was wearing pieces of my mother that no one had spray-painted. Pieces no one had twisted into a weapon. Pieces chosen for me by men who had loved her, failed her, hated her, missedher, and somehow still loved me enough to give me what was left.
For the first time all day, eighteen felt real.
Not like a legal line.
Not like an escape hatch.
Like weight.
Like inheritance.
Like I had stepped into a room inside myself I hadn’t known was waiting.
“I feel…” I started.
Everyone watched me.
I laughed once through my tears because I didn’t have better words. “I feel like an adult.”
Edge’s mouth softened.
“Good,” he said. “But don’t get carried away. You’re still my kid.”
