Sir—do you need a maid? I can do anything. My sister is hungry.” The words tore out of her before she lost her courage, small and hoarse against the iron hush of evening.

The iron gates of the Whitmore estate loomed like ironclad sentinels against a bruised evening sky, their black latticework swallowing the last gold threads of dusk. Most people kept their distance from those gates; they had a way of making hope feel small. But on this night, a young woman stood there with dirt streaking […]

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My mother chose me a beautiful, silent wife. But the moment the door clicked shut on our wedding night, she spoke.

My mother was the chief engineer of my existence, the quiet drafter of every blueprint I ever followed. When my father vanished from our lives—leaving behind a six-year-old boy and a woman suddenly carrying the weight of a collapsing world—she became everything celestial to me: sun for warmth, moon for tide, constellations to steer by. […]

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She didn’t remember her parents—only knew they were geologists and had died in the mountains. The first memory in her soul was silence.

Silence in her soul was her very first memory. Not the silence of peace, but the silence of an emptied nest, the echo of which remained forever. Alisa didn’t remember faces, didn’t remember voices. Only scraps of notions: “geologists,” “mountains,” “rockslide.” And an endless, piercing sense of loss, absorbed with the very milk she’d also […]

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