Signed In Silence
Wren
Leander’s face in shades of ash and stone.
He stood there broken, waiting for me to scream, to strike him, or to collapse under the crushing weight of his confession.
I did none of those things.
The silence inside me was absolute. It was the calm that exists at the bottom of a frozen lake. Every tear I had left had dried up hours ago, leaving behind a hard, crystalline clarity. He had used our meeting, our vows, my father’s dying months, and the bed we shared—every single piece of it—as a weaponized net to catch his uncle.