And on the day I opened my door to her, she was seventeen years old, standing too straight for someone so thin, her hands clenched so tightly around the straps of a worn backpack that her knuckles looked almost white against the dusk.
She didn’t look like a monster.
Monsters never do.
“I have nowhere else,” she said.
That was all.
No apology. No explanation. Just a statement delivered like she had rehearsed it too many times to feel anything about it anymore.
I should have closed the door.
Instead, I stepped aside.
The town never forgave me for that.
They said I was betraying Lila. Said I was letting the past rot in my kitchen like forgotten food.
But the truth was simpler.
I had already lost everything worth protecting.
What was left didn’t feel like a life anymore. Just a structure built around absence.
Mara lived in my guest room.
She kept to herself at first. Ate small portions. Walked quietly. Spoke only when spoken to.
