~LYRA'S POV~
When I was fourteen and scrubbing the floor of Meredith's parlour and the pick house, I used to imagine this moment.
Not specifically this, I hadn't known what specifically to imagine, hadn't had the vocabulary for what the other side of this would look like. But I'd imagined something large. Something loud. A reckoning that shook the walls and made the years of it mean something in the scale of their undoing. Something that finally matched the size of what had been done.
I pushed the door to the holding room open and sat down across from her and felt, tired. And something that was almost pity, but not quite. Pity required more distance than I currently had from it. What I felt was something in the vicinity of pity that had the particular quality of looking at damage and recognising it as damage without having any desire to add to it.
Meredith started with flattery.
