Nella’s POVMaybe if Elena had been the one to bring his child into the world, he would have burned the city down to see her.The thought arrived quietly and landed like a stone in still water.I felt the rings spreading.I was not Elena. I had never been Elena. I was the replacement that wasn't a replacement, the collateral that had somehow become the mother of his child.Quiet sobs slipped out of me before I could stop them.I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.I was so tired. So deeply, completely tired —not just from the labor, though that was a tiredness unlike anything I had experienced before, a tiredness that lived in the bones rather than the muscles —but from everything that had preceded it. It's been months of grief, suspicion, careful watchfulness, it's been learning to read silences and file things away, holding myself together with the specific discipline of a woman who had decided that falling apart was not an option she could afford.Tonight I was too exhausted
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