It’s a slow turn. As if there’s a weight in her head and body that takes effort to move. Her face, the guilt in her eyes, her hands shaking at her sides, I recognize the look. It’s the one she gave me right before she confessed to breaking our mother’s music box.
And I know.
Before she opens her mouth. Before a single word comes out…I know.
"Don't." Valeria's voice cuts across the room. Sharp. "Mary. Don't you say a word."
Mary flinches. But she doesn't stop crying.
"Mary." Valeria again. Lower this time. A warning dressed as softness. "Think about what you're doing."
"I can't—" Mary's voice breaks. Completely. Like something structural giving way. "I can't do this anymore. I can't!"
It starts in my chest, a deep, hollow crack that spreads outward. My ribs feel too small, too fragile, too fucking useless to contain what’s left of me. The pressure builds until I can’t breathe, until the air turns sharp and metallic in my lungs, until I’m choking on years of poison I thought was my own blood.
“You knew.” It’s more a breath than a whisper.
Mary looks at me. And she falls apart, the way people do when they’ve been holding something for too long and the body simply stops cooperating.
Great, heaving sobs that shake her whole frame, hands pressed over her mouth like she can contain it. Until her secrets do what all secrets eventually do.
They come out.
“She promised me that it’ll stop.” The words tear out of her between sobs. She tries to breathe. Can't quite. "She swore to me that she’d never hurt you again.”
The room goes completely silent.
My heart doesn't break. It doesn't break because breaking implies something sudden. This is slower than that. This is the quiet devastation of a foundation you've been standing on your entire life shifting beneath your feet and understanding, with absolute clarity, that it was never solid to begin with.
She knew.
My little sister. The tiny baby in my arms. The thing I've been bleeding for quietly for thirteen years, the thing I handed everything over for, the thing I told myself was worth every mark on my arms and every line and every room and every piece of me Valeria took.
She knew.
"How long?"
Mary looks at me through her tears. The answer is in her face, saying everything she doesn’t have words for.
My mind doesn’t know how to process tears, so my body does the next best thing…ration them to muscle. I feel like all of me could rupture with the effort of not bleeding out in this room.
"I was scared, Reth. And afraid, and I didn’t want to go back to that home. I didn’t want to go back to being an orphan.”
I hear her speak. Hear the words coming out of her mouth. But nothing makes sense. It’s a very distinct thing, to be robbed of a history. To have every moment of sacrifice, every miserable hour of every unendurable day suddenly stopped, rewound, and played again and be completely different.
Mary’s right in front of me now, and she’s got my hands in hers, and I suddenly have no idea who she is.Whatshe is.
“I was a little girl, and I didn't know what to do, and she promised me nothing bad will happen. She swore to me."
"You grew up." My voice doesn’t sound like mine. "You grew up, Mary. You married into this family. You had a son inside these walls." I look at her. "All while knowing what lives here?"
The sob that tears out of her is ugly and enormous. "I know. I'm sorry. But I thought it stopped. It did stop, didn’t it?”
“Only because—” Ice slams into my spine. The cold, hard realization.
“No man will touch you again.”
Rowan. He knew…heknows.
