I did not give up my twenties and thirties because they ever asked me to. I gave them up because someone had to stay at the post.
The teenage years were a long, grinding war of the mind. There were three separate, brutal stretches when all three of them seemed to hate me on purpose. Doors slammed hard enough to split the frames. Curfews were tested. Arguments about cheap clothes and missing privileges tore through our cramped living room.
Yet under the teenage fury, their separate, beautiful shapes began to show.
Ava was the emotional lightning rod, a girl who felt the weight of everything so hard it often brought her to tears before she could name the feeling. Claire was the keeper of memory, clinging to old photographs and familiar routines. And June—June was the quiet, analytical fortress, wearing a terrifyingly serious face over a tightly guarded, vulnerable center.
They were triplets by biology, but entirely different worlds by nature.
Through fevers, ruined high school romances, disastrous science-fair projects, and the choking panic of college tuition, Elias’s ghost stayed at the edge of everything. They never asked about him. I never offered his name. It was an unspoken, iron rule.
By the time the warm, humid air of their university graduation finally reached us, my dark hair had given itself over to iron-gray. My bad knee throbbed with every step.
I stood in the packed, fluorescent auditorium of Wellington University, holding a cheap, outdated digital camera in my shaking, scarred hands. The air smelled of floor wax and the expensive floral perfume of the wealthier parents around me.
As the processional music rose, a sudden, unexplainable dread climbed the base of my spine. I had survived twenty-two years of war to reach this exact moment, yet as I looked at the high stage, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.
Chapter 3: The Breach of Protocol
The commencement was a long, carefully staged parade of academic pride. I ignored the wide speeches about the future. All of my attention narrowed into a single tunnel of desperate, overwhelming pride.
