this is not your choice, I will cut the thread,” Io continued. “I mean it, Edei. I will cut the thread, and I will be your friend instead. Maybe not straightaway, but eventually. I don’t know. But I do know that I will be fine.” And she would be, wouldn’t she? She had been surviving loss all her life: her parents, her childhood, Thais. It would hurt and she would mourn, but she had thought this was her penance, and instead it felt like . . . freedom.
