“I burned it. Scorched it with my root. Cut myself off from Arthur, from Vera, from… everyone. Even my mother.” Mariah sucks in a breath. “How could you?” She stumbles back, distancing herself from me. “Bree, how could you?” And suddenly, there it is. The afterimage feeling, the deep gut echo, the single resonant emotion that my mind has assigned to Mariah: shame.
