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Deliberate.

And maybe that should make me gentler. Maybe it should make me reach for her. Maybe it should be enough to pull the knife out of my voice.

It isn’t.

“So, you decided I should be the one left standing in it alone.”

Cass doesn’t deny it.

The shade tree creaks overhead. Leaves whisper. The farm pretends not to hear.

I turn back to Scarlett, to the place where her body is learning stillness the hard way, and smooth the dirt again even though it doesn’t need smoothing. My fingers tremble. My breath comes shallow and tight.

“I survived anyway.” The words leave me thin and scraped. “Alone.”

I press my palm into the dirt beside Scarlett’s grave, grounding myself in something that doesn’t move no matter how badly I want it to.

“I stood here thinking you abandoned me.” My voice drops until it barely feels like mine. “Thinking you decided grief was easier without me in it.”

Cass swallows.

“I never meant to leave you alone.” Her voice breaks around the truth. “I just thought I could come back before it mattered.”

That’s the part that breaks me. Not the leaving. The miscalculation.

The quiet, stupid belief that she could step out of my life and make it back before the absence became permanent. Before I learned how to wake up without her. Before the house got used to holding only one heartbeat where there used to be three.

“You didn’t even get the mercy of it meaning something,” I say. “You left to save yourself—and they still got you.”

Cass nods. Once.

“They told me you’d come for me.” Her voice is quiet, but it doesn’t shake. That almost makes it worse. “They kept saying it like they knew you better than I did. Like loving me made you easy.”

My spine goes cold.

The words settle between us, ugly and precise.

Cass looks down at her hands.

“They used my choice,” she continues. “But it was still mine first.”

Cass didn’t abandon me because she didn’t care.

She left because she was drowning, and the Iron Gospel didn’t force her into that moment—they just waited for it.

“I buried Scarlett thinking I lost both my sisters in one night.” My voice scrapes thin around the truth. “One to death. One to silence.”

Cass drops to her knees beside me then, not graceful, not careful enough to hide how badly it hurts. She comes close until our shoulders touch, but she doesn’t reach for me.

She knows better.

For a long moment, neither of us moves. The dirt sits in front of us, dark and uneven, holding the sister neither of us knew how to survive losing.

“I’m sorry.” Cass’s voice breaks on it, and she has to swallow before the rest comes. “For leaving. For making you wake up in that house without me. For thinking distance was the same thing as saving us.”

Her shoulder trembles against mine.

“And for being stupid enough to believe I could outrun something that had already learned our names.”