I had never truly met her.

Not in this life.

The memory I carried belonged to another timeline—a dinner Julian staged like a coronation. Crystal gleamed beneath chandeliers, silence lay thick as smoke, and his mother’s eyes had been colder than the silver at her place setting. She had studied me like a stain and said, “You’ll do… for now.”

Within a year, she’d shown me what those words meant. The burn on my hand, dismissed as clumsiness. Her laughter when I begged for kindness. ...