(Aurora's POV)
I couldn't finish the sentence.
I looked at the photograph. She looked back at me with those quiet, certain eyes, and I felt the distance between us - not just years, not just the decades I'd spent not knowing she existed, but something absolute and permanent and impossible to cross.
Phineas crouched beside me. He didn't say anything. He just put his hand over mine where it rested on the stone.
We stayed like that for a while.
On the way back down, I was still trying to put myself back together, piece by piece, when we came around a bend in the path and nearly walked directly into a small group coming up.
A woman in a wheelchair. A man pushing it - tall, well-dressed, somewhere in his fifties. And behind them, a younger attendant carrying a basket.
The woman in the wh
