Myra's Night, Part 2

Andy considered the woman across from him: her jawline sharp against the glass, the brown hair slicked back and still damp, and a faint, instinctive grace that persisted even now. But her eyes—once hawklike—were lost, blind, their focus somewhere in the deep distance. The words she’d just spoken hovered between them, fragile as dust. He looked out the window, then back at her, then out again. A minute passed. Maybe two.

He said, “There’s a balcony, if you want.”

She turned toward him, face blank for a moment, then understanding flickered in. “Could you… take me there?”

He hesitated, but not for long. He stood, circled the island, offered his arm. Myra took it, her grip lighter than before—testing, not trusting. They moved slowly through the Suite, down the corridor past the master bedroom and through a set of glass sliders to the terrace overlooking the lagoon.

Outside, the night pressed in: salt wind, the hush of the tide, a smear of stars overhead. He guided her to the railing, careful of the two steps down, and released her arm when she seemed steady.

She leaned forward, arms braced on the smooth metal. Her hair fluttered, and the long fox tail spilled out from her dress, swaying as if it could taste the air. She inhaled, deep and slow, letting the night fill her lungs.

She stayed at the railing, hands flat on the metal, eyes turned uselessly toward the horizon. The wind caught her hair and wrapped it around her jaw. Andy thought she looked like someone who’d wandered onto the wrong set—she didn’t belong here, but she clung to the moment as if it might explain something.

They stood together in silence, both facing the black sheet of water beyond the balcony. The air was colder than it looked. He could hear her breathing, hear the faint hitch each time the wind cut through her dress.

She spoke first. “What does it look like?” There was no preamble. “The ocean, I mean.”

Andy squinted into the dark. “It’s just water. Pitch black, now. No moon. The stars are brighter than normal.”

She nodded, as if she’d already guessed.

He waited for her to say something else, but she only let out a slow exhale, the kind you made when you’d been holding your breath for years.

After a long minute, she said, “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to not seeing.” Her voice was quiet, almost apologetic. “I keep thinking if I just wait long enough, it’ll come back. Like when you wake up in the middle of the night, and the shapes are there, but you have to stare at them for a while.”

He didn’t know how to respond, so he let the silence answer for him.

Myra shifted her weight and hooked her tail around the bar at the base of the railing. “Can I ask you a weird question?” She didn’t wait for permission. “Do you remember what I was like? Before?” Her fingers drummed the rail. “In middle school, I mean.”

Andy remembered. He remembered the girl who’d built her own gravity well, pulling satellites of weaker girls into her orbit. He remembered the giddy cruelty, the little digs and slights and whispered campaigns. But he also remembered her crying, once, behind the gym, when a teacher had called home and no one answered.

He said, “You were the smartest person in the class. You were popular. You always seemed like you knew what you wanted.”

She smiled, but it was bitter. “That’s the part nobody remembers—the knowing what you want.” She released the railing and let her hands drop to her sides. “I didn’t. Not ever.”

She turned slightly, face toward him though her eyes found nothing. “My mom was never around. My birth mom, I mean. I’m pretty sure she was a hooker. Not even the clever kind. I think she was part of a group of them. Lived in a shack a couple of miles off the Willow Run preserve. There was a... a pimp or anything like that, he'd take one or two of them each night…” She shrugged. “I don’t remember if there were other children, I was too small. When I was five, she left me with a woman she barely knew and just… never came back.”

He stared at her, unsure if he should reply.

She pressed on. “After that, it was foster families. You shuffle around, you learn the rules, you get good at figuring out what people want from you. But you never get to want anything yourself. Because you’re not supposed to.” She laughed, low. “I got moved seven times. Always because of something I did, or didn’t do, or because the family decided they didn’t have enough room after all.”

Andy wanted to tell her she was wrong, that it was never about her, but he knew how these stories went.

She picked at her sleeve, nails working the edge. “I never learned how to belong to anyone, so I tried to make everyone belong to me. That’s what I was, in middle school. It wasn’t about being smart or pretty. It was about controlling the only thing I could.”

The wind whipped the words away as soon as she said them.

After a moment, she added, “Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

He looked at her, and he saw the outline of the girl he used to know—thinner, rawer, all the old tricks stripped away.

She pressed on, soft but relentless. “I chose medicine because I thought if I could fix enough people, I’d stop being broken myself. But the closer I got to being a real person, the worse it felt. Like I was living someone else’s life.”

The next words caught in her throat. “It got better when I started dating. That’s what I told everyone, anyway. The real truth is that it got better when I started working nights, because then I didn’t have to be a person at all. Just a technician. A fixer. I liked that people depended on me, that they needed me. And I hated that I liked it. It made me feel… dirty, I guess.”

She bit her lip. “I’m not explaining this well.”

Andy said, “You are.”

She shook her head. “You remember when I tried to start a fight between James and Nina? The week of the Halloween dance? I made her think he liked her, then told him the opposite.” She wiped her hands on the hem of her dress, as if she could scrub the memory away. “I did that stuff all the time. For no reason. Just because I could.”

He remembered the fight, but not the details.

She straightened, then immediately slumped, as if remembering how to inhabit her own bones. “I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve always been the bad guy. I was a shitty friend, a shitty kid. The last few years I tried to make up for it by being a less shitty doctor, but…” She trailed off, then turned her face to the sky. “Then this happened. And that was it. No more fixing things. I can’t even fix myself.”

Andy tried to imagine it: the world closing down, all of a sudden, until all you could do was stand on a balcony and hope someone would describe it for you.

She hugged herself, shivering. “Sorry for dumping this all at once. I’m not very good at normal conversations anymore.”

He said, “It’s fine. I’d rather hear the truth than small talk.”

She looked relieved. “Thanks.” The word was small, almost childlike.

The wind kicked up again. Myra’s hair whipped around her face, and she caught it, tucking it behind her ears—both the human and the fox set. Andy stared at the motion. He **** himself to relax.

She asked, “Do you want to know the worst part?”

He nodded.

She looked at the water, even though she couldn’t see it. “I used to think, if I ever got this far, I’d be happy to leave the world behind. But now that I’m here—now that there’s nothing left—I just want someone to need me again.” She laughed, but it was a hollow sound. “Is that pathetic?”

He considered the question. “No. I think everyone wants that.”

She smiled at him, and this time it was real. “Thanks,” she said again. Her hand found the railing, gripped it tight.

They stood that way, not touching, both braced against the night.

He couldn’t say whether he felt better or worse after hearing her story, but it was different now—his resentment reframed, not erased, by the simple math of her pain. He didn’t want to forgive her. But he couldn’t hate her, either.

Myra shivered, and the fox tail tightened around her waist.

“Do you want to go back inside?” he asked.

She nodded, then offered her arm, a gesture of trust he found himself surprised to accept.

He led her back through the glass doors, the salt air clinging to their clothes. Neither of them spoke until the balcony was a memory and the night outside could be shut away.

Inside, the Suite was too warm, and the scent of the ocean clung to their clothes. Andy led Myra back to the living room, where the lights were low and the windows caught a faint reflection of the two of them. She moved with careful, measured steps, her feet always finding the middle of each tile.

He led her to the couch, but Myra hesitated, hands out in front of her as if expecting an invisible tripwire. She brushed the edge with her palm, then tried to sit. The tail fought her, bunching and twisting and flopping over the armrest. She made a faint huff of frustration, stood, tried again, and this time landed with the tail curled in her lap, fur spilling over her knees in a ridiculous heap.

She smoothed the dress with both hands. “I guess I’ll never need a throw blanket again,” she said, voice dry as salt.

Andy sat at the opposite end of the couch, elbows on his knees. He didn’t reply. The words from the terrace were still circling, each one anchoring somewhere deep and uncomfortably close to the heart.

For a while, neither of them spoke. The air was thick with the kind of silence that comes after the truth.

Myra shifted, tail flicking restlessly. “Is it weird?” she asked, voice almost a whisper. “The tail, I mean. Or the ears. Or—” She stopped, mouth clamped shut.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. Then: “It’s not that.”

She tilted her face toward him, eyes blank but searching. “Then what?”

He picked at a loose thread in his jeans, rolling it between thumb and finger. “I’m sorry,” he said. “About everything. I didn’t know.”

She waited, uncertain if this was forgiveness or just another apology to keep the world moving.

He looked at her, then away. “When did you decide you wanted to change?” He wasn’t sure why he asked it. Maybe because he needed to know if there was a before, or if regret had just always been part of her biology.

She folded her hands on her lap, tail wrapped protectively around her legs. “It was after Laura died,” she said. The name was a stone, dropped in a glass of still water.

Andy stiffened, but she couldn’t see it. Still, she must have sensed the shift in the air, because her next words came more carefully.

“I don’t remember what started the fight. I think it was about you, but maybe that’s just how I remember it.” She toyed with a clump of fur, working the ends between her fingers. “We were all thirteen, and everything felt so much bigger than it really was. Laura and I got into it, I said something I shouldn’t have, and I knew I hurt her. I could see it.”

She stopped. The silence filled in, heavy and slow.

“I thought I’d have time to fix it,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I thought if I gave her a few days, we could go back to normal. But the next day, she was dead.”

Andy let the words wash over him. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t her fault, but the truth was more complicated than that.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on her face,” Myra said. “Every time I closed my eyes, it was there. Like it was burned in.” She swallowed. “That was the last thing I ever gave her.”

She sat with it, letting the admission hang.

“So I tried to change,” she said. “Not because I thought anyone would forgive me, but because I realized I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I started helping people, because if I was fixing things, maybe I could forget what I’d broken.” She gave a brittle smile. “It sounds stupid when I say it out loud.”

Andy didn’t say it was stupid. He saw the logic, even if it was backwards.

She looked down at her hands, voice growing fainter. “Sometimes I think it’s just about paying off a debt. Like if I help enough people, I’ll even out the scales. But it never does.”

He found himself gripping the couch cushion, knuckles white. “You became a doctor,” he said, the words sticking to the back of his throat.

She nodded. “I wanted to make sure I never hurt anyone again. Not by accident, not by words, not by being careless.” She flexed her fingers. “I drove myself into the ground to do it. And now… I can’t even take care of myself.”

He heard the shame in her voice, and something else—a thread of anger, maybe, or a refusal to surrender.

He thought about Laura then: how she’d wanted to be a doctor, too. How she used to drag him out to the creek behind their old houses, patching up little frogs with makeshift splints and bandages. Laura would have made a better doctor than either of them.

He wondered if Myra knew that. If it was just a coincidence, or if, somehow, she’d been running the same relay Laura never got to finish.

He asked, “Did you know Laura wanted to go into medicine?”

Myra blinked, startled. “No. I didn’t.”

He exhaled, slow. “She talked about it all the time.”

She nodded, silent.

The conversation drifted. Myra’s hands went to her tail, stroking the fur as if she could distract herself from the world. She seemed smaller than before, dwarfed by the couch and the night outside.

Eventually, she asked, “What about you? Is this… I mean, are you okay with all of this? The show, the women, the… whatever we’re supposed to call it.”

Andy shrugged, staring at his knees. “I don’t know. Some days it feels like a dream. Other days it feels like I’m just waiting for someone to tell me I can wake up.”

She smiled, but it was a tired thing. “I get that.”

He hesitated, then added, “Sometimes I wonder if this is a punishment. Or if it’s supposed to be a reward. But it never feels like either.”

Myra nodded. “Maybe it’s both.”

The silence returned, but it wasn’t empty anymore. It hummed with a kind of mutual recognition, like they were two sides of the same coin—forever linked by something they couldn’t undo.

Myra curled into herself, drawing her tail close. Andy watched her, and for the first time since she’d arrived, he saw not the villain of his old stories, but someone just as lost as he was.

Andy had lost track of time, but the wine bottle was empty, and the city of lights below had given way to a single blinking buoy on the water—slow, steady, a heartbeat at the edge of the black.

He glanced at Myra. She was hunched on the far end of the couch, knees drawn up, tail curled tight as a python around her calves. He had the sense that if he moved too quickly, she would vanish. Some things, once named, could not be unnamed.

He stood first, stretching until his shoulders cracked. “It’s late,” he said. “You want to get some sleep?”

Myra looked up, blank eyes hovering somewhere to his left. “Yeah,” she said, as if the word was foreign. “Yeah, okay.”

He watched her stand, watched the way her feet found the floor and how she checked every step with a soft tap, like she expected the ground to be a trick. She followed him down the short hallway, one hand on the wall, the other stretched forward, fingertips touching his polo shirt.

The bedroom was a huge ellipsoid, the king bed anchored in the middle. The sheets were a pale blue today, the color of old hospital walls, and the pillows were stacked three deep. Andy clicked on a bedside lamp, but the light was gentle, just enough to paint their shadows across the far wall.

Myra paused at the doorway, one bare foot on the carpet, the other on tile. She hesitated for a beat too long, then said, “Is this where we’re supposed to…?”

He shook his head, then remembered. “I’m afraid so. But the bed is large, and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Not tonight, not ever.”

She let out a slow breath, the relief so clear it was almost embarrassing. She took another careful step, and the tail followed, then brushed the footboard. She ran her hand along the edge of the mattress, fingers fanning out as if testing for splinters.

Andy changed in the bathroom. When he came out in boxers and a t-shirt, Myra was sitting on the near side of the bed, back straight, hands folded in her lap. She’d let her hair out; it tumbled across her shoulders, chestnut brown. She wore the same dress as before, but she’d unbuttoned the collar. The skin at her throat was unmarked, but she kept touching it, like she expected to find a bruise.

He slipped into bed first, rolling to his side, leaving a canyon of blue between them. Myra waited, counting heartbeats, then climbed under the covers and lay rigid on her side, hands resting on her stomach like she was feeling sick. Her tail bunched under the blanket, then snaked out and curled around her ankle.

Andy lay rigid on his side of the bed, staring into a darkness that felt bigger than the room itself. He could hear the tide through the window, the hush and suck of water against the distant lagoon wall. Myra breathed slow and shallow, but never quite still; her hands never stopped moving, fidgeting at the hem of the dress, smoothing and unsmoothing it in a cycle that suggested she was as far from sleep as he was.

He thought about reaching out, saying something—anything to break the tension—but every word he rehearsed came up short, awkward, or worse: patronizing. Instead, he stared at the ceiling, waiting for the silence to calcify into something they could live with.

At some point, he realized that Myra was drifting closer. Not in any deliberate way, but more like she’d shifted during the night and inertia had done the rest. The gap between them shrank to the width of a hand, then less. The tail, that impossible plume of fur, had worked its way over the center line and now brushed against his calf, moving with the slow, tidal logic of her breath.

Andy closed his eyes and tried to lose himself in the rhythm of it. He thought about how many times in his life he’d lain next to someone and felt less than this—less present, less ****, less real. The tail pressed gently against his shin, a tentative anchor. He let it rest there.

In the dark, Myra's voice startled him. "I used to wonder about this," she said. It was so soft he barely caught it over the surf. "What it would be like, to just... sleep next to you."

Andy's stomach tightened. He stared at the ceiling, suddenly hyperaware of the inches between them.

She rolled her head on the pillow, not facing him, but enough that he heard the next words more clearly. "Is it weird to admit that?"

"A little," he said, the honesty slipping out before he could stop it. "We barely knew each other back then."

A silence stretched between them, awkward and stiff.

Myra curled tighter, hugging her own ribs. The tail tensed, went still, then relaxed, brushing against his leg again as if in apology. She said, "I don't think I'm ever going to get used to it. Not just the eyes. The way everything's... changed."

He felt a flash of pity. Not affection, but something simpler—recognition of another human being in pain. "Does it help to talk about it?"

She let out a breath, long and thin. “No. But it helps that you’re here.”

He almost laughed. “I’ve never been very helpful.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” she murmured. “You were the only person I ever looked up to, even when I was an asshole.” The tail twitched, as if startled by the admission. “That’s probably why I was such an asshole.”

Andy blinked, the words prickling somewhere deep and sore. For a long time, he’d imagined that Myra’s entire purpose in middle school had been to make everyone’s life harder, to test every boundary until it broke. Now he wondered if she’d just been reaching for something—anything—to hang onto.

He thought about the conversation on the terrace, about how she’d said she wanted to be needed. The words stuck with him. He realized, with a kind of cold shock, that this was exactly the trap he’d fallen into: hating Myra was easier than forgiving himself. He’d carried the story of Laura’s **** like a personal curse for so long that it had become a part of his skeleton. It was easier to blame the ghost of Myra than to admit he’d never gotten over that day at the footbridge, that he still relived it, every time he thought about loss.

He turned onto his back, staring at the ceiling. Myra’s breathing had evened out, the hush between inhales growing longer and longer. He wasn’t sure if she was asleep or just pretending. Maybe it didn’t matter.

For a while, he let the quiet take him. The room settled. The ocean outside kept its ancient rhythm. He waited for the old anger to flare, but instead, he found himself thinking about what Marissa had said—that regret was a scar that kept growing after the wound was gone. It made a sick kind of sense.

Andy listened to the sound of Myra’s breath and decided, finally, to tell her.

He didn’t start with an accusation, or even her name. He just started with the story.

“When I was thirteen,” he said, “I thought life was just something you got through. I didn’t believe in happy endings. Or even unhappy ones. Everything just… happened. You floated along until you hit the next thing, and that was it.”

He paused, but Myra didn’t move. Her breath stayed steady.

“I didn’t know how much Laura meant to me until it was too late. Not really. I knew she was the best person I’d ever met, and I knew I wanted to be better when I was around her, but I didn’t know what to do with that. I think maybe she didn’t, either.” He rolled his head to the side, staring at the faint outline of her form in the dark. “The day she died, I thought it was my fault. Not in the dramatic, movie way. But in the way where you know that every choice you made led up to that moment, and if you had been stronger, or smarter, or just… more, maybe she wouldn’t have gone to the river that day.”

He heard Myra’s breath catch, just once. Then it was steady again.

“She came to the footbridge because she was hurt. Someone told her a story about me. That I was Chloe’s boyfriend, or that I didn’t care about her, or that I was just taking pity on her. And she believed it. Why wouldn’t she? Everyone else did.” He swallowed. “She confronted me there, and I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be defending against. I just knew that she was furious, and that I couldn’t let her walk away until we’d fixed it.”

He waited, but Myra didn’t interrupt.

“I grabbed her arm, and she pulled away. And I slipped and and fell into the water.” His own breath felt brittle. “The river was deep that year, and there was a current. I panicked, but she… jumped into the water. For me. She got me out. She saved me, not the other way around. She grabbed my hand and shoved me up to the bank, but she couldn’t get back up herself. I watched her go under, and by the time I got to the riverside, it was over.”

He lay there, feeling the old familiar ache open up inside him. For a moment, there in the darkness, he thought he could almost see Laura’s face looking at him, not with rage or panic, just… sorrow. He felt tears in his eyes. He wanted to be better, in her memory.

“I told myself for years that it was an accident. But it never felt that way.” His voice broke, and he stared at the ceiling. “I spent sixteen years being angry at everyone else for it. At myself, at you, at Riley, at the whole fucking town. But I think I was just angry that I couldn’t save her. That I couldn’t even save myself. And that she died thinking I had betrayed her, but still saved me nonetheless.”

The silence that followed was absolute.

After a minute, Myra said, “I didn’t know.” The words were hollowed out, raw.

He shook his head. “No one did.”

She shifted, rolling onto her back. The tail unfurled, then curled up again. She clutched the edge of the blanket, holding it so tight her knuckles went white.

He waited, letting the words do their damage.

Myra’s breath grew uneven, then jagged. “Who told her the story?” The voice was so faint he almost missed it.

Andy didn’t answer, not at first. He lay in the dark, the words perched behind his teeth like a verdict he didn’t want to render. The answer had always been an atom of poison in his bloodstream: inert, then suddenly catastrophic.

“It was you,” he said. “You told her.”

The silence wasn’t a silence, not really. It was a rush of white noise behind his ears, the blood pounding, the soft patter of Myra’s breathing stuttering as she absorbed the words.

Her hands went rigid on the blanket. The tail, which had fallen slack along the mattress, stiffened in a straight line, every bristle standing at attention. Her entire body seemed to shrink, as if the bed had suddenly become too big for her to anchor in place.

“I—” she started, but the sound collapsed in her throat. “That can’t be right.”

Andy didn’t move. “Riley remembered Laura telling her. I never knew it at the time, but… yeah. You told her. The day before.”

He expected denial, maybe anger, maybe the lashing out that came when someone was cornered by the worst version of themselves. But Myra didn’t do any of that. She just lay there, arms cinched around her ribs, blank eyes locked somewhere above her head.

“No,” she said, but it wasn’t a refusal. It was the sound of a person falling through the floor. “No, I… I don’t even remember that. I thought…” Her jaw worked. “I thought it was just a fight. About homework. Or… I don’t know, something stupid. I don’t remember telling her anything about you.”

Andy waited, letting her own memory catch up with her.

She pulled the covers to her chin. “Did I… did I say something bad?”

Andy didn’t know how to soften it. He let the words land as gently as he could. “You told her I was only hanging out with her because I felt sorry for her. That she should stay away, because everyone was laughing behind her back. That I didn’t care about her, and that I had made out with Chloe behind the gym.” His own breath went thin. “You made her believe she was alone.”

Myra’s hand clawed at the blanket, knuckles gone white. The tail flexed against the mattress, a whip frozen at the moment before the strike.

She didn’t speak. Andy wondered if she was even breathing.

He said, “She went to the river because she thought I’d been lying to her, about everything. She needed to hear the truth from me, so she met me there, on the footbridge. That’s why it happened. That’s why she—” He stopped, the sentence refusing to finish itself.

He could feel Myra’s body trembling, a fine, convulsive shiver that started at the base of the spine and worked up into her jaw. The air was charged now, every molecule waiting for the next thing to happen.

“I don’t remember,” she whispered, but even she didn’t believe it. “I don’t remember. But I must have.” She turned her face away from him, voice so low it nearly evaporated. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

He almost wanted her to scream, to throw something, to tell him he was wrong. Anything but this.

“You were thirteen,” he said, not sure if it was a comfort or an indictment. “We all were.”

Myra curled tighter, drawing her knees to her chest, tail wrapping around her legs with the defensive urgency of a wounded animal. For a long time, nothing existed in the room except the shared hush of their breathing, the pulse of the ocean filtered through the heavy glass. He lay on his back, hands on his stomach, unsure if he was comforting her or punishing himself.

“I thought I could fix it,” Myra said, each word a measured fragment. “I always thought there’d be time.”

Andy closed his eyes, letting the memory play out one last time: Laura’s face at the riverbank, the accusation in her eyes, the wet shock of her hand on his collar. He remembered the hand, the surge that flung him to the muddy bank while she disappeared beneath the surface. It had never left him. He wondered if it ever would.

Myra’s breath came ragged, each exhale slower than the last. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to be better. Trying to make up for… everything. But I never knew what it was I was fixing.”

She laughed, once, and the sound was brittle as glass. “I wanted to save people. That was the whole point. But I couldn’t even save people from myself.”

He reached across the bed, slow and hesitant. His fingers brushed the back of her hand, cold and tense, gripping the edge of the blanket like it might keep her from flying apart. He didn't pull her in, just let his hand rest on hers, the touch anchoring them both to the same piece of reality.

For a minute, Myra didn't move. Then she turned her palm and threaded her fingers through his, holding on tight, like someone afraid of drowning.

She said, "I didn't know." The words hung there, thin and absolute.

Andy squeezed her hand, not trusting himself to speak. The weight of their shared burden pressed down on his chest—how strange that after all these years, he'd find himself here with Myra of all people, both of them carrying the same impossible weight. Riley had been there too, had seen it happen, but Riley hadn't set the wheels in motion. Not like they had.

"I should have done more," he whispered. "I knew she was upset. I knew something was wrong."

Myra's fingers tightened around his. "And I should have kept my mouth shut."

The symmetry of it struck him then—how they'd both failed Laura in such different ways, yet with the same result. Myra's jealous words and his frozen inaction, twin catalysts in a reaction neither could stop once it began.

They lay like that, side by side in the blue predawn, nothing between them but old ghosts and the gravity of the truth. The tail relaxed, slowly, curling in around Myra's hip, its bristles smoothing back down to velvet. Her breathing calmed, the jaggedness giving way to a slow, exhausted rhythm.

He kept his eyes on the ceiling, counting the shadows. He didn't know if this was forgiveness, or just the next stage of the hurt. But it was better than silence, better than pretending it had never happened. Better than carrying it alone.

Myra didn't let go. She held his hand through the night, even as sleep finally found her and the tension left her muscles, one by one. When the dawn burned a new edge on the horizon, their fingers were still laced, joined by the single thing neither of them could ever undo—the guilt that had shaped them both into the people they'd become.