LyraI went to Maren the next morning.Not because the meeting was scheduled, it was not, not until Thursday. I went because I needed to sit across from someone who had known my mother and say what the records meant without managing anyone else's reaction to the saying of it. Ronan would listen, but he would also be thinking strategy at the same time, and I could see that thinking even in his silences, and right now I did not want to be anyone's strategy. I wanted to say the thing out loud and have it be received as a thing, not an input.Maren's office was warm. It always was. She kept dried herbs in a glass jar on the windowsill and the sun came through it in the late morning and made the room smell like something old and capable. She was writing when I knocked and she looked up and read my face before I spoke and said, "Sit down," without preamble.I sat.I told her everything in the order it happened. The records Isadora had found. The nine years. The forty-seven names. The spec
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