Delilah, curled on the sectional with her knees drawn up, lifted her head just enough to look at her mother.
The girl's eyes were red-rimmed — not from crying. Delilah hadn't cried for her lost twin and the whole truth since the night Phei carried them out of the Maxton Estate.
The tears had been spent, or stored, or frozen, or something. What remained was the sheer, grinding exhaustion of a mind trying to hold contradictory truths in the same skull without splitting apart.
Melissa set the spatula down with deliberate care, as though sudden movement might shatter something fragile — not the spatula, not the pan, but the filament-thin thread of conversation that had just begun to unspool between mother and daughter.
She turned in Phei's arms until she could face both him and Delilah, back braced against the island edge, robe slipping further to expose the curve of her breast and the bite mark that still bloomed dark against her skin.
