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At least that was how it felt.
All eyes on me, all filled with varying degrees of pity or horror.
Personally… I felt nothing.
In the initial confusion afterThe Gardenfell, I went radio silent.
I found a truly remote place to exist and shut the world completely out, taught myself to meditate, and did the slow mental work of dissecting my own psyche from what had been implanted in me.
Years.
And I still came out of it ready to kill.
Some might say I hadn’t done enough healing and… I didn’t give a shit if they were right or not. By the time I re-entered society, I was certain of my path, and that path started with getting the answers I’d long been denied.
The main question beingwhy.
I never got to ask.
It wasn’t hard to find my mother; she wasn’t hiding, not exactly. She’d changed her name and staged a comeback for her career, blamed all the drama of the time on her “out of wedlock pregnancy”.
Which—yes, what she endured was horrible and she was undeniably a victim.
And then I discoveredmore.
Discovered the lie she weaved to explain my absence, I was supposedly born sickly and had succumbed to some illness. She even had a death certificate for me.
I “died” the day she dropped me off atThe Gardenas payment for her own freedom.
Tapping back into my hatred of her wassoeasy.
She was a victim, yes, but that didn’t excuse the abuse she’d heaped onto me as a child, and it made her taking me to that place, knowing what would happen to me… downright evil.
I couldn’t get myself calm enough to approach her.
So I watched from a distance—watched her life, watched her movies, immersed myself in who she wasnow, trying to understand.
She had sad eyes.
All the damn time.
She could hide it when she was acting, but in real life, I could see it; she was tortured by her past.
It made me feel better.
Knowing that she wasn’t happy mademea little happier and that was the key to my finally being able to approach her for answers.
The day that was intended to happen though… as I was breaking in, Margeaux was breaking out.
She seemed genuinely surprised to see me.
Scared,even.
It had been at least a year since I’d last run into her. I discovered later that while it wasnotintentional, it also wasn’t random.
The answers we needed in our separate pursuits of peace overlapped in several key places.
“Why did you wantherdead?” Tati was the one to ask. “It can’t be because she was a Belrose; you already knew that about her, right?”
