Elara had grown accustomed to the quiet kind of suffering that did not bruise the skin but settled deep beneath it, the sort that threaded itself through ordinary mornings and unremarkable afternoons until it became indistinguishable from the rhythm of breathing, and because she had never learned how to protest the unfairness of her life without feeling selfish or ungrateful, she allowed each disappointment to stack carefully upon the last, building an invisible architecture of endurance that appeared strong from the outside but trembled constantly within.
Elara had grown accustomed to the quiet kind of suffering that did not bruise the skin but settled deep beneath it, the sort that threaded itself through ordinary mornings and unremarkable afternoons until it became indistinguishable from the rhythm of breathing, and because she had never learned...