I couldn't feel my fingers anymore. The garden air had turned frigid as night settled over the Sterling estate, but I barely noticed. My body had gone numb long before the cold could touch me.
Beatrice's rejection echoed in my mind like a cruel mantra. "I think you should go." Four simple words that collapsed twenty years of what I'd thought was love.
I stared at the ornate fountain before me, its water frozen mid-cascade in the winter chill. How fitting. I felt just as frozen, just as suspended.
All those nights when I'd cried myself to sleep, I'd held onto memories of Beatrice's kindness like precious gems. The secret cookies she'd slip me when Genevieve had sent me to bed without dinner. The gentle way she'd tend my scrapes when no one was watching. The books she'd leave outside my door—my only escape from the reality of being unwanted.
"It was all a lie," I whispered to the empty garden.
