I will not pretend the road there had been simple, or that it belonged to anyone’s business but mine and Cormac’s, and I’ll only say this much: the family I had been told for six years I could never have had, it turned out, only ever been waiting on the truth.

My body had not failed.

It had been lied about.

And once the lie was cleared away, it did what it had always been able to do.

The pregnancy was high-risk — that much was the surgery’s lasting signature, the one real scar Cassian’s fraud had left in my body rather than only in my mind.

I made my peace with that scar slowly.