She hangs her cape in her wardrobe, her movements slow and methodical. “I feel like I’ve learned a lot about you over the last few months, and I don’t like it.”

“Such as?”

“Like … just … you come first, okay? You obviously come first. In everything. And in most things, the rest of us have to just accept that. But you do not have the ability to care about your friends, or prioritize them, the way a normal person does. It’s like you have this … role to fill, and that’s the only thing that matters, and you turn into this soulless void … thing whenever you have to choose between us or it.”

Her words are English, yet they leave me completely baffled. “Of course I have a role,” I say. “That’s hardly new information, is it?”

Molly shrugs. “I don’t think it used to feel so toxic. Or maybe I just never noticed it before, I don’t know.”

“What did I do, exactly, that was so toxic?”

“How long have you got?” Molly asks. I want to reply “all night,” but I’m fully aware it’s rhetorical. “Like I said, it’s not one thing. It’s everything, every chance you get. You don’t care, about—about anything else. Definitely not about any of us. If something has nothing to do with the crown, it’s either all a big joke, or it doesn’t exist. It’s like you have no real fucking emotions. Nothing else matters to you.”

“Of course I care,” I say. “I especially care about you.”

“I believe you think you do,” she says. “But your eyes are empty. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.”

And at this, I’m left speechless. Her words claw at my chest, squeezing and choking, until the center of me feels hollowed out. I knew Molly was furious with me—of course I did—but I thought, I really, truly supposed, that if I simply gave her the space she so obviously wanted, she would simmer down and we would discuss whatever was bothering her. It hadn’t occurred to me, not even for a moment, that the person I considered my best friend could hate me, sans hyperbole.

She hates me. Even right now, she can barely stand to look at me. And for a moment, I’m unraveling where I stand, thread by thread.

But only for a moment. Then I clench my fists, and my jaw, and take several steady breaths, until I feel the ground beneath my feet again. My heart rate slows, and the edges of the world stop blurring.