I Died Loving You, I Woke Up Hating You

Sandra’s POVI didn’t answer right away.I just sat there on the edge of the mattress with my hand still pressed flat against my ribs and my heart doing something violent inside my chest. Three knocks. That pause. That voice.Dara.It couldn’t be Dara. Dara had gotten sick when I was twenty two — something that moved fast and didn’t respond to anything the pack healers tried. I’d sat with her through most of it. Held her hand at the end. Watched her go in a way that was somehow quieter and more devastating than my own death had been, which felt appropriate because that was always how it was with Dara. She made everything feel more real than it actually was.She died two years before I did.So the voice on the other side of that door was not Dara’s voice.Except it was.“Sandra.” Again. A little louder this time, with that specific texture she had when she was trying not to sound worried and failing. “I can hear you moving around. Are you sick?”I stood up. Sat back down. Stood up agai

Sandra’s POVHe didn’t follow me back inside.I sat on that bench for another ten minutes after he left, hands folded in my lap, watching the tree line like it owed me something. My heart was doing that thing again — that slow unsteady thing I had no patience for — and I waited until it stopped before I moved.The expression on his face when I’d said should there be kept coming back to me. I’d catalogued every version of Zadok’s face over six years and that particular one didn’t exist anywhere in my inventory. It wasn’t confusion exactly. It wasn’t irritation. It was something closer to — recalibration. Like I’d said something that didn’t fit the model he was working from and he was quietly adjusting.Good. Let him adjust.I went back inside and spent the rest of the morning doing what eighteen year old Sandra would do — helped Dara with the linen inventory, stayed out of my father’s way, kept my head down and my mouth useful. I was good at invisible. I’d been practicing it my whole l