Until him doing it made the life start to come back into me.

His patience was astounding.

And beautiful.

He was perfect.

Utterly.

But even in that perfection he was broken.

Completely.

And I had no idea what to do about it.

My mother would have known. Or at the very least, I could have talked to her about it and she would have helped me decide what to do.

But my mother was no longer here.

And it was times like these, and other times I knew would be varied and abundant in the years to come, where I missed her like it had been but moments since she had passed, not weeks.

I also wondered if this feeling would ever ease.

But I could not think of me.

I had to think of True.

I also thought about the conversation I’d had with Mars that day.

For, outside True, he was all I had left.

I knew Elpis wished to heal the breach between us. In fact, she had changed her mind and come on this trip so she could attend my wedding.

And with as little as I now had in my life, I knew it was foolish to resist her advances.

She had not been openly unkind to my mother.

But Elpis had blamed Mama for something she did not do, something Elpis knew she did not do, but she blamed her all the same.

I was having trouble coming to terms with that, and when I shared this with my intended, True advised me that I had enough to come to terms with—the loss of my mother, my impending wedding to him, the Beast rousing—Elpis could wait.

And he was right.

I would have liked to talk to True’s mother about what was troubling her son, but even if I knew True had had words with her about her coldness to me, that coldness had not changed.

Which was something else concerning me for the longer his mother kept her distance from her soon-to-be daughter-in-law, the angrier True became about it.

He tried to hide this from me, and he was good at it.

He did not hide this from his mother, and I could tell she was not fond of it.

And she felt I was the cause of it.

Therefore, I had the suspicion she blamed me.

And since Silence seemed to be avoiding me for whatever reason (perhaps she wasn’t good with grief, though she seemed wholly adept at handling just about everything else that came her way, and a great deal had come her way since this all began)…

And since True was in love with Elena, and he was the one I needed assistance with in the first place…

This left me with Mars.