Justina's heart stopped the moment the maid told her Amara was home, resting upstairs, waiting the way she always used to wait for her children at the end of a school day.
Justina stood frozen in the front hallway for a long moment, unable to feel her own legs, caught between two versions of the same terror, one where her mother had woken up, and everything might, somehow, still be salvageable.
And another where her mother had woken up and would never look at her the same way again, where the truth would finally have to come out in full, and everyone in her life would learn exactly what she'd done and hate her for it.
She walked up the stairs slowly, Sebastian's words looping through her mind the whole way your mother is a good woman, set against her own, the ones she'd thrown at Amara in that bedroom before everything fell apart.
