LOGINA huge THANK YOU to some of my amazing readers who have been showering my books with comments, reviews, gems, and so much love. 💖 Your support means more than you know, and every notification from you puts a smile on my face.
This week's special shout-out goes to:
🌸 Jeanine Myer
🌸 Phylease Sams
🌸 TNF
🌸 Sharon Logan
🌸 Christine Brayton
🌸 Anice Coe
🌸 Allison Greene Palmer
Thank you for reading, cheering me on, and being part of this journey. I truly appreciate each and every one of you. ❤️
To everyone I couldn't name this week, I see you too. Thank you for your unwavering support, your comments, your reviews, your gems, and for being part of this incredible journey. I appreciate every single one of you. 🥰📚
Thank you all for making this dream possible. ❤️
JOHN'S POVCora was supposed to be in the clinic at seven. Ten past, she wasn't. Twenty past, I walked the front path end to end twice and found nobody on it, and I quit pretending she'd only been running late.The page was still open on my desk and my coffee had gone cold.7:00 — Cora. Alone. No notes.Last night she stood in my doorway with something she clearly wanted to tell me. It was all over her face. She opened her mouth twice and stopped both times, and I told her to come back in the morning and do it properly, because what I wanted was a chair, a shut door, and Morwen at the table with a pen.I got the chair. I got the shut door. Now, I have Cora.Morwen came in at ten to eight, hung her coat on the peg, and stopped beside the supply cart."That's still not done.""No."Her hand stayed on the handle of it. Cora restocked that cart before anybody else was through the front, every working day for six years, and Morwen stood there a while before she said anything else."Where i
ALICE'S POVI organized my medical bag before I remembered I wasn't allowed to treat anyone.The instruments were clean. They'd been clean for days. I took them out anyway — stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, otoscope — and laid them along the desk in the order I use them during an exam. Then placed them back in the bag. Then my own shelf: bandages by size, syringes by gauge, the little of it I keep in this house. The list of what's in that bag didn't need rewriting. I rewrote it anyway.It kept my hands busy so my head didn't have to sit still. Didn't have to land on Lily's hand reaching for the desk, or Lisa's voice in that chamber, or the name that came up when Harris asked who wanted me dead.The window was open. Outside, the compound got on with its morning — children near the fountain, warriors in the training yard, somebody two houses along running a mower before six.Then a voice went up, a child's, high and frightened.Somebody get a doctor right now!Another, further off, alr
A huge THANK YOU to some of my amazing readers who have been showering my books with comments, reviews, gems, and so much love. 💖 Your support means more than you know, and every notification from you puts a smile on my face.This week's special shout-out goes to:🌸 Jeanine Myer🌸 Phylease Sams🌸 TNF🌸 Sharon Logan🌸 Christine Brayton🌸 Anice Coe🌸 Allison Greene PalmerThank you for reading, cheering me on, and being part of this journey. I truly appreciate each and every one of you. ❤️To everyone I couldn't name this week, I see you too. Thank you for your unwavering support, your comments, your reviews, your gems, and for being part of this incredible journey. I appreciate every single one of you. 🥰📚Thank you all for making this dream possible. ❤️
John’s POV "When you came back and there was a new name in the book. Was the ink still wet?"She sat with that, hands flat on the desk, wanting to give me an answer she didn't have, and I made myself sit there and watch."I never looked," she said. "It was a visitor's name in a visitors' book. Why would I look."The log had been in the evidence box six days and I'd been through it forty times. Out it came again.Twelve entries on that page, eleven of them dry and a little faded, because that's what ink does in a warm room. The twelfth — nine ten in, nine thirty out, the name that doesn't exist anywhere in the pack records — is darker than the eleven above it.Not by much. You wouldn't catch it unless you'd tried everywhere else first."It's the same pen," Morwen said. "It's the pen that lives on that desk.""I know.""So it means nothing.""It might mean that entry is younger than the ones above it.""Younger by how long?""That's the part I can't give you." I slid it back in the sle
JOHN'S POVThe clinic opened the morning after the hearing, and the first thing anybody said to me was about it."Three people asked when Doctor Watson's coming back," Morwen said. "Two wouldn't be seen by me at all. They're sitting out there anyway, so they'll change their minds by eleven." She set a chart down. "And four of them wanted to know what she said in that chamber. I told them to ask an elder.""What did they hear she said?""That she was sorry. And that she wouldn't give a name." Morwen looked at me over the top of the desk. "The second one's gone round this compound faster than the first."She testified for three hours yesterday while I stood outside a room they wouldn't let me into, and I haven't been able to get to her house anymore, because a doctor carrying a case file is exactly who those men have been told to keep off that doorstep. She'll have eaten nothing since. She'll have gone home and reorganized a cupboard instead without watching TV or doing anything else.I
Benjamin’s POV "Or she was clever enough to see it coming.""Then there is no answer available to her." He turned his palms up and let them drop. "None. You've built a shape she can't get out of. Calm and she's hiding it. Distressed and she's performing. Helpful and she's clever. Silent and she's guilty. I've sat at this table thirty years and I won't vote inside a shape like that."Marcus spoke without lifting his eyes off the page in front of him. "There's a simpler problem and we all keep walking around it. Every ruling in this business has come from a man who cannot be objective about the woman at the center of it, and this morning he negotiated the terms of her questioning and had them recorded under his own name."That was my moment to answer him. There wasn't a sentence in me that wouldn't have proved him right in front of eight people, so I stayed where I was and let Marcus have the last word about me while Harris wrote something down.Then Petra said, "So we tighten the conf
ALICE’S POVI should have taken Lucian home.I should have picked him up, carried him away from this festival of false joy and false hope, and tucked him into bed with a story, a kiss, and a promise that tomorrow would be better.But I didn’t. Because Lucian wanted to see the fireworks. And I could
ALICE’S POVThe Blue Moon Festival was Lucian’s idea of heaven and my four-year plan of endurance.He’d been talking about it for weeks—the lanterns, the fireworks, the honey cakes from the booth near the stage. When he’d asked, he’d pressed both hands together like he was praying, eyes wide, and I
ALICE’S POVThe days that followed had a rhythm I didn’t trust.Benjamin came every morning. He actually sat at the table — something I still hadn’t gotten used to — and ate whatever I put in front of him. He returned every evening and stayed until Lucian’s eyes drifted shut.Four mornings in a row
ALICE’S POVBy the time I walked into the hospital room, I had composed myself completely. My face was set.Lucian was awake, sitting up in bed. His face brightened the moment he saw me."Mommy. You came back.""I came back." I lifted him into my arms. He smelled like baby shampoo, antiseptic, and







