ALEXANDER
It had been days since everything that happened. Days since Faye woke up.
Days since I watched my mother collapse onto the floor after forcing herself through a ritual that should never have been possible in the first place.
Helen had insisted she was perfectly fine.
Which, naturally, meant I believed absolutely none of it.
I knew my mother.
That was the problem.
Everyone else heard Helen say she was fine and accepted it.
I heard her say she was fine and immediately became suspicious.
Because she would smile through a broken arm if she thought it would stop people from seeing her as weak.
The woman had always been impossible.
Stubborn.
Ridiculously stubborn.
The kind of stubborn that made other stubborn people, including myself, look reasonable.
She had refused to s
