Quiet Suffering

Everyone keeps asking what happened between me and Knight. I don't answer. Not because I'm protecting some big secret, but because saying it out loud makes it real, and I'm not ready for real yet.

Sam doesn't know the whole story. Quillan's heard enough to hate him a little more than usual. The rest of Splendor's just filling in the blanks with whatever version sounds juiciest. Let them. It's easier than the truth.

The only place I still see Knight is in my dreams, standing exactly where he stood the first night we met, like he's trying to remind me of who we were before everything fell apart. I wake up every time with my chest aching and my pillow damp, and I tell myself that's the last one. It never is.

I'm supposed to be moving on. I'm supposed to be fine. Instead I'm quietly falling apart in the spaces nobody else can see, one dream at a time, while the rest of the world keeps spinning like my heart isn't currently sitting in pieces on the floor.

Grief doesn't always look like crying in public. Sometimes it just looks like getting out of bed anyway.

Quiet Suffering is Book Eleven in the Knight's Fae series, where the hardest goodbyes are the ones nobody else ever has to witness.