I shook my head. The thing I couldn’t make Octavia understand was that my fate and Arthur’s had somehow become tangled, and the knot was impossible to undo. Since the day he’d walked into this library, refusing all my book suggestions and overtures of friendship, I’d known that he meant something—that he meant something to me. If Octavia had any idea how bleak and empty my life had been for all these years, how desperately I’d wanted to feel that human connection again, she’d know. I could no more walk away from Arthur McLachlan than I could my own sister.
