SERAPHINA’S POV
I was exhausted. That had to be it. Or maybe my wistfulness and longing had conjured up this outrageous sight.
Because there was no universe where Margaret Lockwood stood on my porch with a pie in her hands—eerily identical to the one Mrs. Barnes had pressed into mine—like some doting mother out of a storybook.
Not when the pain from the last time I’d seen her was still fresh, like a new wound.
The image rose in my mind—her face carved with disdain, her words slicing me open in that suffocating hospital room. ‘She tried to kill my daughter!’
She hadn’t even flinched as she delivered that gutting accusation.
Whether she knew it or not, in that very moment, with the broken pieces of my family as witnesses, my mother had shoveled the last bit of dirt onto the grave of our already dead relationship.
She’d chosen Celeste. She’d shoved me aside.
And there was nothing left between me and Margaret Lockwood anymore.
So I tried to ignore her.
