Sweet Romance19 min read
My Twin Died — But the World Was Wrong
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I remember the sound of the city when they thought I was dead.
They celebrated. Lanterns bobbed like a tide. People drank and shouted my end. I listened at a hidden window, the word "monster" and "witch" whipping through the air like broken paper, and felt the odd comfort of being misunderstood.
"Anastasia—" I whispered to the dark. "They cheered for Laurel."
My sister's name traveled on ropes of gilded compliments. Lauded as a goddess, carried in a painted sedan, but it wasn't my breath that filled those songs. It was hers.
"I never wanted her fate," I said aloud to the room that held only my own shadow.
When Laurel was born, the rain came. When I arrived, the lightning struck the palace. People like patterns; priests like reasons. They drew a line between us and called one blessing, the other curse.
"You are the unlucky one. Keep your distance," Mother told me once, smoothing the sleeve of the favored child while I watched a collar of dust glint on the floor. The words weren’t cruel because they were shouted; they were cruel because they were casual. Cruelty that sounds like common sense is the worst kind.
From then on, my life slid into shapes I couldn't fit. I learned to be small. I learned to be invisible. I learned to swallow the sting of other people's superstition.
"You and Laurel look the same," neighbors would say, like an accusation. "Only she brings rain and you bring lightning."
I grew used to the way people looked away.
"Anastasia," a young servant boy once said, "don't stand so close. You'll bring us mischief."
"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "I only stand where I choose."
He ran.
The world got used to doing the running for me.
Then the palace invitation came—the Empress called the House of Schuster's daughters to a ceremony. Laurel was to perform before the court; the role of the future consort was being decided. My father couldn't stop grinning. My mother wore a face like a public mask.
"You will go," Father said to me, with the grave indifference of one giving alms he found burdensome. "Observe. Be quiet."
Laurel practiced dances that made the air taste sweet. She glowed; she was bred to glow. I wore a dress and moved like the shadow of a candle. When she hurt herself—whose toe on a badly fixed drum, whose foot slipped—I saw who the court blamed.
"A bad star," someone whispered. "It follows the house."
"The little one," they nodded, and my name became a tally in the minds of ministers and diviners.
At night I saw the hand that had tampered with the drum. I saw it bent over the instrument, faltering, then slipping away. I tried to speak, and no one believed the shadow like mine.
That night they sent me away.
"The country road," Father said. "Go to the manor outside the city. Reed yourself."
Laurel's expression when we left was a slow burn of pleasure. "Finally," she said. "At last I won't have to watch you."
"I watched you my whole life," I wanted to say. I didn't. I let the carriage pull me away, toward a place the map thought forgettable.
The highway invited thieves like a honeyed bowl invites flies.
"They will take the pretty one, then the other for ransom," the lead brigand sneered.
They didn't know about the fire inside me, about the white-hot fear that can make a woman do things history might later call savage.
"Leave her," I told them, voice small and calm. "Take whatever else."
He laughed and tore the cloth at my throat. Enough of the mask fell away that I felt the world as a blade. I pulled a hairpin and burned the air with movement.
One cut, two, a small river like beet juice spread across my face, and the brigand's grin went slack, then dead. I remember the smell, thick and copper sweet. I remember the look in those men's eyes, the way a thing called respect came late and with terror.
"You..." one whispered as he collapsed. "Who are you?"
"Just someone who won't be killed," I said. That was true in the narrow way a woman can be true when the road is wide and the night wider.
Men rode up. Armor, silver crests. The leader had a face like a storybook hero in my sister's painted portraits—full cheeks, a clean jaw. He carried no arrogance. He looked, for a strange second, like someone who could be kind.
"You are hurt," he said.
"I can bind a wound," I answered, because why not form a transaction from danger.
He studied me. "You are the Schuster manor's younger daughter."
I almost laughed. "Then tell my family I'm in a ditch."
Instead he helped me to my feet. He rode me back toward safety and the world obeyed, briefly. His name, whispered later in the roads we both traveled, was Dion Blevins. He is what the court called the Fourth Prince.
"Thank you," I said, voice raw as the roadside.
"I do not believe in bad stars," he said.
Something in me found a small place to rest. "Neither do I anymore," I lied.
He left me at the manor, and then the world tasted different, like silver on the tongue. People said he was small in ambition, that he lacked the court's hunger. I saw him lift his hand to the sky and the sky did not answer. He had no lineage of favors to show; his mother had been low, his place in the family like a patch on a garment. That gave him nothing—and perhaps that was why he could be kinder.
We met again at a temple. Laurel was there in her white, moving like a held prayer, and the Prince saw a likeness and came over. He offered me an umbrella in the sun—as if two simple bones of kindness could unmake the long narrations of my life.
Later, after the bomb of the drum and the sending away, he found me again on a road to Jiangnan where the floods had made the ground too wide for good sense. He was escorting grain. He took me among his troops because he had the patience and courage to guard a woman others thought worthless.
"You will come with me," he told me. "You can be safe."
"Safe?" I said. "And how would that look?"
"Like a warm fire," said Dion. He was not a man of many metaphors, but even his few were iron-strong.
We rode into lands that had been broken by water. I saw the world split into desperate people who had to steal to eat, and his soldiers who had to do the saving. Among the rust and mud, I watched him become a kind of shelter. He bruised his leg saving a cart. I held him, ignorant then of everything except the sound of his breath.
"Why linger?" I asked him, folding a bandage that stained my hands.
"Sometimes a man must take a chance," he said. "Sometimes he must be where his heart says to be."
I thought him a dreamer. I thought he was reckless. I learned he was something more dangerous—principled. People mistake that trait for softness, but there is a cruelty to choosing to be good in a rotten age.
When rumors came that the Crown Prince had died—an accident at a hunt—the palace turned like a disturbed wasp nest. Blame, always hungry, needed a source. Older men with charts and lines called the stars and said my existence had lined catastrophe. They said the gods had made Laurel a blessing and me a blade.
I could have fled. My father might have wanted to see me gone—out of sight and that would be that. But I had learned the first law of survival: if you are nothing, you are disposable. If you can be something—useful, dangerous, human—then perhaps you have a chance.
Dion dragged me back to his house when the city heat thickened. He argued to hide me, to smear my scent across courtyards. He gave me a room, a name that wasn't his in the records: his servant. It hurt me, that being a "servant" could save me, but hunger sharpens pride into tools.
One night he returned with the cold in his limbs and a serious look.
"Do you trust me?" he asked.
"I do not trust anyone," I answered. It was true.
"Then trust me," he said. "I will not stand idle while you are thrown to wolves."
We fell into a pattern that felt like a small civil war. I made bargains with men I had to rely on, and he brought me pieces of the world that were new and terrible and kind. He joked that he would give me an ornate knife to match my skill; he gave me a dagger whose blade was beautiful but dangerous and told me it was mine to hold when the world got rough.
When the city fell into a rumor—that I had not died in Jiangnan but slipped away to Dion's house—everything shifted. Some were shocked. Others were relieved. My father thought he could use this. The Empress, Alicia Thomas, smelled leverage; she liked strings. She wanted the House of Schuster controlled.
"She must marry my son," she told her ministers. "Or the House must be broken."
Behind her palms, the chessboard creaked.
I agreed to a scheme: make Laurel believe an exchange; make the court think Laurel would be the bride; hide me; let Laurel step forward and be used. It was a fragile theater built on other people's assumptions. Laurel was vain—she wore her innocence like a perfume. She wanted to be adored by a man she imagined heroic. She wanted the very seat I wanted to avoid.
"Help me," I told her one night, the false smile on my face keeping its place.
"You want me to take your life?" Laurel snapped, more honest than I had allowed her.
"You know the truth," I said. "Help me hide. Let me be the one you show the world."
She hesitated. Pride is an obstinate animal. "The Prince will notice," she said.
"It doesn't matter who notices," I answered. "It matters who believes."
She took the bait. People wanted a visible bride. Father wanted a political alliance. The Empress wanted to control both.
But plans are like kite strings—someone else can cut them.
"Why would you live like this?" Dion asked me one night, watching me trace a seam in a curtain.
"Because the alternative was to die," I said. I did not tell him the truth: that sometimes survival asks for shame, and sometimes it asks for cunning. He did not ask which I chose.
Laurel moved forward to the center of attention. She rehearsed her smiles. She practiced being seen. She called the drums on herself and the drums answered. At the wedding, the palace lanterns made the room look like a sun collapsed. People leaned in like they were watching a play. For some silly reason, people preferred to see a tragedy coming than an ordinary, messy survival.
"You will be queen of our house," Father had crowed when he thought he had won. He had always been good at imagining winners.
The day of the wedding, I sat behind a curtain in the carriage, ready to disappear. My hands were empty but for the hairpin that had kept me alive before. Men stationed on the walls, guards chewed their lips and tried to be patient. A note had come the night before, burning and quick: "Trust the Prince."
We moved slow. The city smelled like incense and old power. People crowded. I felt the old fear that rises before something is taken away: a sense that a life I had built of careful ash could blow into nothing at the wrong gust.
Then a shout: "Ambush!"
Steel flashed. I remember a man falling in the corridor, a scream half-swallowed by the drums. Someone had stabbed the new bride in the sedan. The crowd's mouth opened in a sound like a bell being struck.
Laurel fell.
She bled into the silk like a false sunset. Someone shouted, and the crowd moved like a wave. Men tried to pull the carriage lid back, but the groom—Dion—was already there. His face, when he saw Laurel, turned into something I did not recognize: not anger, not sorrow, but a cold that might have been decision.
"Who did it?" he demanded.
"It was—" a minister stammered. "They say a trancer, a blade, a—"
The rumors came faster than truth.
Laurel's face was already slack. I couldn't move. All the arrangements, all the promises, the whole house of cards—collapsed in one quiet chair. The throne room's silence drank the sounds.
"Stop," I told the world.
"Anastasia, you are covered in blood," Dion said to me, and in that one line was the whole of his confusion.
Laurel was carried away. And the city—so eager for spectacle—cheered for the end of the witch. They hailed their relief as if it were justice.
I wanted to say everything I saw: the rigged drum, the secret servant who had been paid, the names whispered in alleys. But who listens to a shadow?
"You must go," Dion said, and he meant it in the only way a man of his rank could: he had prepared his household to accept me as property, as a debt he could do right by. "Stay with me," he said. "There is a place for you."
We did not marry that day. They wrote epistles saying Laurel had died and I had been spirited away. In the markets and the alleys they set my tomb in rumor and thought themselves clever.
I stayed with Dion. He paid for the remedy to remove the scar at my brow. He told the court he would protect me. He told the Empress something more cunning: that he would do whatever she wished if she only let this marriage be for appearances.
She accepted some bargains. Politics is a ledger: you always need a coin to buy quiet.
But the truth is a pest. It gnaws and will out.
The brigand I had left alive from the first attack came back. Men with worn boots and bad promises now spoke in an odd voice when their throats were loose: they had a different master. "You ordered us to take her," one said, eyes to his knees.
"Who?" I demanded.
"The Prince," he whispered. He had been left alive once, paid false money, and he carried a rotten secret.
"Betrayal," I said.
"Not all betrayal is equal," Dion answered when confronted, standing in the courtyard like some carved statue. "I did not plan that attack."
"Then who did?" I asked, my voice breaking.
The wind brought a laugh in the hallway—light, cultivated, and cruel. It was Alicia Thomas, the Empress, and she stood like a queen untroubled.
"You are brave to accuse," she said, as if brave were another way of saying naïve. "But you should learn that the court does not tolerate accusation without proof."
"Prove what you wish," I shot back. "Expose what you hide."
She smiled, thumbs hooked in fabric. "I did not kill your sister. I only used circumstances to right an imbalance."
"Right an imbalance?" I repeated.
"Power," she said. "Is the throne so pure you dare call it less? Men make bargains. You are not the only one who suffers myths. I have cared for the realm. I have prevented worse things than a marriage."
"You made me into a monster," I said. "You gave my name to a fate. You gambled with people as if they were fortunes."
"People are currency," she answered. "You should be grateful I kept you breathing to play my game."
I wanted to tear that smile off her face.
Instead, I learned patience.
"Wait," I told her and the men lining the corridor. "Wait until the truth unrolls."
"Anastasia," Dion said, hand warm and urgent at my wrist. "You must be careful."
"I have no choice," I answered. "If I hide, I die. If I step out, I get torn to pieces."
He kissed my forehead then, with a tenderness that had the power to break up stubborn fear.
"Let them watch," he said. "We will make sure they watch their own filth."
For months we collected whispers like coins. Myrtle Beil, my closest attendant by now, turned out to be more than a servant—she had eyes in corridors and a tongue in the right ears. Blake Wagner, a man from my Prince's circle, brought the dark tidings of deals and secret lists.
I learned of Father Bronson Schuster's pacts—sales of offices, a ledger of handshakes that smelled like bribes. I learned that his hands had been open to the Empress, and her reach had been invasive, her orders surgical.
"This is treason," I said.
"It is life," Myrtle answered. She had been twice stabbed for me, once by a thief and once by a lie, and still she kept a face like iron.
We planned. Dion planned. He never promised crowns. He promised a small thing: a way to hold court accountable in a public place where rumors could be answered with witness and paper.
"A public hearing," he said. "We will not kill. We will show."
"Then let's set the stage," I said.
The morning of the punishment, the city was a birdcage. People pressed to the square like rust on iron. The air hummed with gossip—someone had heard, someone else had dared to act. The Empress arrived, bejeweled and cold, as if winter were a mood she could wear. My father sat in a chair like a man who thought himself still king of a small field. Laurel, not yet turned to dust, lay pale in the palace's infirmary where tongues had been too quick to pronounce death.
"They say she was your hand," people muttered as they passed me, and the words felt like stones thrown into a quiet pond watching me.
Dion stood at my side when we stepped onto the platform. "You will speak," he said.
"No," I said. "You will."
He refused.
"Then I will," Myrtle said.
"Let me be," I told them. "I will not let the spectacle be shaped by anyone else's need for drama."
Dion took my hand anyway. "You will not be alone."
The Empress had gathered a council of the usual sort: judges who bent, priests who preferred incense to truth, men who had been bribed into respectable silence. They sat like oaks that had been nailed into place.
"Bring them," Alicia said, voice like polished stone. "Bring the accusers. Bring your evidence."
We called the brigands first—the ones who had been paid and survived. Their hands trembled. People loved a confession, especially one that confirmed their prejudices.
"Yes," one man said, with the cheapness of fear in his voice. "They said take the little one; if the other died, we'd be paid more."
"Who gave the orders?" I asked, throat tight. Every eye in the square turned to my father.
He stammered, color draining.
"Who else?" Myrtle demanded, her voice sharp.
"They were told the Prince would be paid to ensure the trade," the brigand said. "But then the Prince fled. They said it was... it was orders from the household."
"Name someone who is not your household," Blake growled, stepping forward. "Did anyone pay the men who set the drum? Did anyone pay the men who cut the bride's path?"
"Yes," the man answered, and the whisper around us rose like wind. "They said a high lady signed a paper. Lady Thomas's mark."
The square crashed into noise. "Alicia Thomas!" someone yelled.
Alicia smiled but did not speak. Her hands were empty of tremor.
"This is slander!" she said. "You have nothing but the word of thieves."
"Bring the paper," Dion said.
There was a rustling. The men who did the dirty work had a count of receipts hidden in a chest. Blake produced them—small notes, hand-copied directions and rings of payment. They smelled of courtrooms and money.
I felt it—the room must have felt it: a pivot crack. The magistrates whispered as the proofs spread like a stain. The Empress's face hardly changed. She sat as if she intended all this spectacle to end at her will. But she had not counted on people with nothing to lose.
"How much did you pay?" I asked the brigand.
"A thousand coins, and two promises of rank," he said. "One to the man who handled removal."
The crowd roared. Men who had been called cheats were suddenly heroes for telling truth. Women wiped their faces with rough sleeves. The magistrates looked toward Alicia like children who'd caught their parent in a lie.
"Father?" I said. The word was a gamble.
Bronson Schuster's face collapsed like burnt paper. "I did not—" he began.
"You did," Myrtle said. "You signed papers. You accepted gold to sell office. You allowed your daughter to become a tool."
The crowd turned on him. "Traitor!" someone shouted. "Sellout!"
"No!" Father cried. "I kept the house! I kept the line!"
"At the cost of other lives," I said. "You used her and you used us."
Laurel, wheeled into the doorway, opened her eyes for the first time in days. "Anastasia?" she whispered, and the room folded around that soft small sound like a map around a star.
"Dion," I said, and his jaw set. "Bring the witnesses you have."
He called on the steward who had cheated with the drums. The man bent until his spine made a sound like a twig. He confessed to the tampering at our wedding rehearsal: the drum had been tamped to fall. The steward's hand trembled when he named the one who had placed the coin.
"Alicia Thomas," the man said. "She demanded obedience."
The Empress's lips pressed thin. She stood then, an image of unruffled royal poise.
"How dare you!" she cried. "This square is a circus. Arrest these men—"
"Arrest us?" Father bellowed, frantic. "Arrest me for saving our line?"
"Not for saving," I said. "For selling your honor."
"What about the law?" the Emperor's judge intoned, but the law had been bending like grass in a storm for years. Now the storm had two strong arms: truth and people who had nothing to lose.
Dion strode forward and said a sentence that echoed like a hammer: "We will not have a private theft of a nation's future. We will examine every paper. Each coin will be traced."
"Publicly," Myrtle added. "Let the market see what the great do."
The magistrates looked at one another. Something like fear—real, new fear—shimmered. They were creatures of comfort.
Alicia's reaction altered. Her composed mask collapsed in stages. First surprise. Then denial. Then the flash like ice of comprehension. Then a face I had never seen on her: panic, then a kind of animal fury.
"You think to shame me?" she hissed. "Me—Alicia Thomas?"
"Yes," I said. "It is you. The paper. The signatures. The payments."
She laughed, brittle and unpleasant. "I have done what was necessary for the realm. What would you have had me do? Let the army fall into chaos?"
"Not by sacrificing people," I answered. "Not by making a daughter into a punchline."
The crowd shifted, the noise rising. Men shouted for retribution. Women bared fingernails like courts. Children watched their mothers and saw a place where truth mattered. The magistrates, at last, rose in motion and called for the formal reading of lists. Papers were spread. Names were recited. The Empress's marks were there, faint but her own.
Alicia had a reaction I'd expected—anger then pleading. "This is politics," she said. "You cannot punish a ruler for saving a nation."
"Politics," Myrtle repeated, with a smile of certain cruelty, "is less noble when it's a reason to kill."
The humiliation was public. Then the punishment was public. The law had been mocked enough; a performance of consequence was needed for people's faith to hang on. The magistrates pronounced censure. Father Bronson Schuster had sold appointments and would be stripped of titles and goods in a formal parade through the city. The Empress—because no one was foolish enough to sentence a woman of her reach to exile or straightforward shame—was publicly denounced, her secret payments disclosed, her favor curbed. She was made to kneel in the temple and recite the names of those she had endangered, a symbolic act in front of priests and the people.
The Empress's change unfolded like a slow striptease of dignity. I watched the expression on her face move in clear frames: the first, disbelief; the second, razor-sharp anger; the third, a cold disbelief that anyone would dare; then a quiver of denial; then finally the crumple—a raw human breakdown of plans unmasked.
"You will see me fall," she said, voice brittle. "I will not—"
"We never promised you a gentle season," Dion said. His voice was a stone thrown into a still pool.
Her reactions were visible to everyone: Pride, shock, denial, fury, then pleading. The crowd recorded each shift. People whispered and took out their small wooden tablets; they drew the scene like witnesses.
Father Bronson Schuster reacted differently. He had always been a man who believed his deeds practical. Seeing his ledger delivered to the market square was like seeing his bones exhibited. At first he looked incredulous, then contempted, the way an old gambler might at a lost hand. As the crowd turned against him, he attempted to bargain, promising lands, trades—but trades mean little when dignity is gone. "I sold my title to protect my house!" he bawled. "Do you not see the world is dangerous? What else could I do?"
"Teach your children a better trade than treachery," I said. "Start by owning what you have done."
He staggered, as if struck. The magistrates stripped him of insignia. Men came forward to tear the banners of his house from poles. The crowd cheered like a wave. He looked at me as if for verdict from my eyes. I did not grant it. Instead I watched, a careful witness to a public unmaking.
And when they came to Alicia, the Empress—her punishment was staged to be a caution. She was forced to walk through the market, to show face before the people she had used, to have her orders read aloud, and to hear a chorus of condemnation uttered like a sentence. Priests demanded she make amends. She was required to donate funds to the widows and the poor she had used as props.
The Empress's reaction passed from angry to incredulous to bargaining. At first she spat, then pleaded, and when she realized bargaining failed, her façade cracked. She looked like someone watching her best mask burn. The crowd's reaction was a mirror: some reviled, some celebrated, some—rarely—pitied. The sound of papers fluttered. Voices rose, clapped, hissed.
No sentence could fully return the lives that had nearly been ended—the sisters, the bargains that had nearly cost a life, the small, private cruelties—but justice is a breath that steadies a city. Watching the Empress humbled before people who once bowed was a rough comfort.
When the public hearing ended, the square emptied and the light shivered. I felt almost fragile, as if the birds under my ribs had been startled. Laurel's face was still pale, but she looked at me with a small, human regret. "I did not know," she said. "I was blind."
"You were hungry," I answered.
She bowed her head. Her confession was not a spectacle; it was a small, private scraping of grime away from a face that had been polished too much.
Dion took my hand and said, "We have broken one web today."
"Other webs remain," I answered.
"Then we will walk until we find the knife."
While Alicia's public punishment was not the end of her influence—power’s roots are thick—the unmasking altered the way the city breathed. Men who had bowed before her found themselves measured differently in other rooms. Father walked out of the market with no scepter and his head lowered. The crowd who had jeered for my death now looked at me like a woman who had returned from the dead and chosen to stand.
"You intended to make me a tool," I told Dion later as we walked down a river road. "You could have hidden me away like a trinket. Instead you let me fight."
"It was your fight," he said. "I only gave you a stage."
"That's not truer," I said. "But it's something."
We left the city together, not as prince and wife—no title could be properly ours yet—but as two people who had been given the only honest thing in a crooked season: choice. In the years that followed, we learned the cost of choices and the rare, small beauty of them.
Laurel's death—rumors had said she died in the carriage, but she survived the blade. She survived first because she was not the center of the court's anger and then because she was—faintly—human. After the public punishment, she gave up the pursuit she had once loved and faded into a quieter, smaller place in the house. There were no great trials for her. There was only a long, thin apology that tasted of humility.
I do not forget the man I once was taught to be: small, quiet, a pariah in my own home. People will still hiss their old names; superstition does not die overnight. But the Empress's humiliation, my father's stripping, the public parade of proofs—all that changed the texture of things. People learned that crowns don't make hands clean.
Dion and I took what we had. We rode to places where no one had seen us before. We found a town in the south where the dust is both old and forgiving. We bought a house with a courtyard and a low roof. We filled it with things that had not been part of court: books that weren't written as proof, bread that was not a bribe, mornings that were not rehearsed.
Sometimes the past arrived like a letter: a bird in the rafters, a face in the market, a scene in a court transcript. Sometimes it arrived as a person—Myrtle, who laughed too much now, and Blake, who had the gall to make jokes in the face of a past he had helped make. They were constant, like a small, ragged stool you take everywhere because you cannot stand for long.
"You saved me," I told Dion one night, as we lay under a thin moon.
"I guarded you," he corrected gently. "You chose to live."
"Maybe," I said. "But you made the choice easier."
The nights were thin but honest. When the world leaned in to watch us perform the next trick, we would step aside and do the small things: mend clothes, learn recipes, teach children how to bind a wound and how to tell truth from rumor.
Sometimes I give my hand a thought like an old scar and say aloud, "I killed to live."
Dion laughs at that, because he knows the truth to be more complicated than a sentence. "You did not kill," he says. "You defended yourself."
"Defence is an unromantic word," I say. "But it is the one that fits."
In the end, when the city grew smaller in distance and larger in memory, we found peace in trivialities: a teapot that never cracked, a dog who insisted on sitting on our feet, a pair of rice bowls chipped at the rim.
One morning, years later, my daughter—named for a woman who had once been called a goddess and then not—asked me quietly, "Mama, why did they call you a witch?"
I took her hand and looked at the horizon where the desert and green met, and I chose the simplest answer.
"Because they needed a story," I said. "Stories are easier than looking in the mirror."
She thought about that and then ran off to chase a bird.
I sat with Dion on the low wall, and we listened to the town breathe.
"Do you ever regret," he asked, "what we did?"
"Every day I regret the price," I said. "And every morning I'm glad I'm here to regret it."
He squeezed my hand. "Then that's enough."
There is a red mark on my brow I will never forget. There are names the city still whispers—some kind and some cruel. But when the lanterns are hung and the children are quiet in their beds, I look at the man who kept me and know the truth: we survived because we chose each other on a morning when most people would have chosen safety over love, and because we made the powerful watch when they thought they could act without being seen.
That is all a good life has ever asked of us.
The End
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