For a long time afterward, it was not Damon I lay awake thinking about.

It was Veronica.

She was seven years old, and she had spent the worst morning of her life with her murdered mother’s terror pouring through her, feeling in her own small throat what had been done to Tessa’s, hearing screams no one else could hear.

No child is built to carry that.

I had spent years treating her sensitivity as a charming family quirk, the thing that made her seem older than she was, and I had never once had to reckon with what it might cost her — until it cost her that.

I worried, in those first weeks, that the ordeal had marked her for good.