Not physically, but emotionally—the way truth can rearrange gravity without warning.
“Why?” I asked.
It came out softer than I expected.
A broken sound more than a word.
Mara swallowed hard.
“Because I was told to.”
Silence filled the kitchen like water rising.
I stared at her, searching for the old certainty I had lived with for a decade.
The certainty that had kept me standing.
That had given grief a direction.
And I realized, with a slow, sickening clarity, that I didn’t have it anymore.
“Who told you?” I said.
Mara’s hands trembled.
For the first time since she had arrived, she looked her age.
Seventeen. Still a child, in some ways.
Still someone who should never have been standing in this kind of story.
But her answer didn’t come immediately.
Instead, she walked to the kitchen table and sat down like her legs couldn’t hold her anymore.
Then she said:
“Someone who knew where she went.”
My heart slammed hard against my ribs.
“Where who went?” I whispered, though I already knew.
Mara finally looked at me directly.
And what I saw in her eyes wasn’t guilt.
It was something worse.
It was memory.
“Lila,” she said.
I don’t remember moving.
Only that suddenly I was standing across from her, gripping the edge of the counter hard enough that my fingers hurt.
“Start from the beginning,” I said.
Mara nodded slowly.
And when she spoke again, her voice was no longer hesitant.
It was like something inside her had broken open and finally let the truth breathe.
“That day,” she said, “we didn’t go to the quarry by accident.”
I frowned.
“What do you mean?”
“We were told to go there.”
A long pause.
Then:
“There was someone waiting.”
The air in the kitchen changed.
