It’s harder to be awed by someone so irritating. She watches me, unnaturally still and calm. “But I’ll need more if you want me to stay.” I need your help.”Ī matter of life and death, she said. Her stare is bold, unflinching, and as the silence stretches between us, I feel more exposed, more raw. She rubs the fabric with her thumb and studies me. One of her hands reaches for the collar of her white silk dress. My thoughts are furred, though, and even as I try and think the name Mara, I’m hardly able to get past the first letter. “If you don’t give me a name, I’ll choose one for you myself,” I say. Her voice snaps me back to attention, to this moment, facing this not-Mara beside me. “I told you my name.”īecause her name sticks in my throat. She sits beside me, looking straight ahead, but I see her smile in profile. The first thing I asked her wasn’t how she was alive or why, but. The shape of Mara’s mouth when she’s hiding a secret behind her lips is the shape her grandmother’s takes, too. When Mara closes her eyes to search for just the right word, she closes hers as well. The shadow of laughter behind her eyes when something amuses her but she won’t share. Or rather, she looks like someone Mara’ll look like someday, a living, breathing perversion of her. THE DAY STELLA JUMPED, THE day Mara left, her grandmother turned up in a white dress and a black car and told me to get in if I wanted to save her. The Reckoning of Noah Shaw 1 MY TRAGIC HEROINE
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