She leaned forward, pressing her forehead against his. In the intimacy of the dark, the ghosts of the day, the cliff, the hospital, the bitter memory of Elara began to lose their jagged edges.
"I keep thinking," she murmured against his skin, "that if I had just been stronger, if I had just done more... maybe none of it would have ended this way."
Julian pulled back just enough to look her in the eyes, his expression fierce, almost pained by her self-reproach. "You are not a goddess, Amara. You are a woman who has been asked to carry the weight of an entire world. And even the strongest pillars crack if the ground beneath them is always shifting."
He moved to sit beside her, pulling her head onto his shoulder. As she finally exhaled, a long, shuddering release of the day's trauma he began to speak in low, steady rhythms, talking not about the past or the tragedy, but about the mundane, beautiful future he wanted to build with her.
