Chapter 6

I started my job search the way my father taught me to start anything difficult — early, before I could talk myself out of it.

I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold beside me and a list of shops within walking distance, because I didn't have a car and wasn't about to ask my father for one on top of everything else he'd already given me. Bakery. Flower shop. A little bookstore two streets over with a hand-painted sign that had seen better years. I circled the bookstore twice.

By mid-morning I was standing in front of it, smoothing down my blouse, telling myself I looked presentable enough for someone who'd spent the last week scrubbing dust out of an abandoned apartment.

A bell rang over the door when I stepped inside, and a woman looked up from behind the counter — sixty-something, silver hair pulled back, glasses perched low on her nose.

"Help you find something, dear?"

"Actually," I said, and my voice only wobbled a little, "I was hoping you might be hiring."

She looked me over, not unkindly, more like she was taking inventory. "You read much?"

"My whole life."

"Worked a register before?"

"No. But I've run a household. Managed people, managed disputes, kept things organized when everyone around me was falling apart." I hadn't meant to say that much, but it came out anyway, and something in her face shifted, like she recognized the shape of a woman who'd been holding more than her share for longer than was fair.

"Pregnant?" she asked, nodding at the hand I hadn't realized I'd pressed to my stomach.

I froze. "Does that matter?"

"Not to me." She shrugged, easy about it in a way that nearly undid me. "Just means you'll need to sit sometimes. I've got a stool behind the counter nobody uses."

"So — you're hiring?"

"I'm old and my knees hate the stairs to the storage room. You want the job, it's yours. Mornings, four days a week, we'll figure out more once the baby comes."

I stood there blinking at her like she'd handed me something fragile. "Thank you," I said, and my voice cracked right down the middle of the word. "Thank you so much."

"Don't thank me yet. Wait till you've alphabetized the mystery section." She waved a hand toward the back. "Name's Dorothy. Yours?"

"Elena."

"Well, Elena." She smiled, small but real. "Welcome aboard."

I walked out of that bookstore feeling lighter than I had in days, lighter than I'd expected to feel over a part-time register job at a shop that smelled like old paper and coffee grounds. It wasn't much. It wasn't a pack, wasn't a title, wasn't anything close to the life I used to have. But it was mine. Nobody had handed it to me out of pity or obligation. I'd asked for it and I'd gotten it, on my own two feet, and that meant something.

I called my father that evening to tell him. "You didn't need to do that yet," he said, though I could hear the pride underneath the worry in his voice. "You could've rested another week."

"I needed this, Dad." I sat down on the couch, hand resting where it always seemed to rest lately. "I needed to prove to myself I could still build something without him."

He was quiet a moment. "You were always going to be fine, Elena. I never doubted that part."

"I doubted it," I admitted. "For a while there, I really did."

"And now?"

I looked around the little apartment — clean now, actually livable, sunlight coming through windows that had been black with grime a week ago. "Now I think I might actually be okay."

---

Camille was still on her knees in the grove long after the goddess's silence had stretched past bearable.

She'd asked her question and gotten nothing back but wind and the rustle of leaves, and something about that nothing felt worse than any answer could have. She stayed anyway, because leaving without a response felt like admitting the goddess had already decided something Camille wasn't ready to hear.

"Please," she said, quieter now, all the performance gone out of her voice. "I need to know."

*Fate is not something to be edited after the fact, child.* The voice came slower this time, heavier. *You asked for a life. You did not ask what shape that life would take once it was yours.*

"So you're saying no." Camille's hands curled into fists against her knees. "You're saying I can't change it."

*I am saying you already changed something the moment you knelt here and asked for what belonged to another woman. Every choice carries its own weight forward. You wanted her place. You did not ask to inherit what came bound to it.*

"That's not an answer."

*It is the only one you're going to get tonight.*

The light around the altar dimmed, the goddess's presence pulling back like tide receding from shore, and Camille was left alone in the dark grove with nothing but her own ragged breathing and the sound of wind moving through branches overhead.

She sat back on her heels, one hand drifting to her stomach, and for the first time since she'd stood beside Ethan at that rite in her white dress, radiant and certain, a cold seed of doubt took root in her chest and refused to leave.

Because if the goddess wouldn't promise her a son, that meant only one thing.

She might already be carrying the very thing that could cost her everything she'd just fought to take.