The Girl He Sold Returned As The King’s Mate Chapter 23
On the day Adrian was transferred to the northern prison, Maeve asked if I wanted to go watch.
“No.”
“You waited so many years. Don’t you want to see him lose the one thing he cared about most with your own eyes?”
“I already did.”
At the hearing, he wasn’t horrified that he had sold a child.
He was outraged that the Crown refused to preserve his future.
He didn’t lose that future because of something I said.
He lost it because the first down payment on that future was the price he got for a child’s life.
A letter arrived from Isla in prison.
She wrote that she had never wished me harm, that she had only been terrified of losing Daniel’s and Adrian’s love.
At the end, she asked if we could have been real sisters, if only we had been born with the same rights.
I never answered.
The unfairness she suffered came from Daniel.
But trapping me in injustice forever could never have brought her fairness.
That letter was filed away with the supplemental case records.
Not as a keepsake.
But as a statement proving she knew the truth and chose to conceal it.
After winter set in, I went back to the Riverbend dock one last time.
The old tollbooth was gone, but the ferries still churned across the water.
Miriam stood with me on the bank.
She asked, “Do you still remember the night you left?”
“I do.”
“Are you still afraid?”
“Sometimes.”