The End of Us novel · Chapter 4 of 24
Chapter 4: Half a Bridge
I walked out onto the bridge in the clothes I had slept in.
Keith came after me and stopped two steps behind my shoulder.
Ginny stayed on the porch with her phone held up, recording.
The Dunstan guard stood in a line at the far end, forty men and women who had once saluted me in the Hall.
Not one of them would look me in the eye.
Quinton stepped forward until his boots touched the iron.
"Isla, come home."
He looked as though he had not slept.
"Our home is where I was told to stay in my seat," I said. "I'm done sitting in it."
"You've misunderstood. I can fix this."
"Fix what?"
"The seat. Maud named Marina until the full moon, that's all. It's temporary. You come back, you wait in the Hall like nothing happened, and when the moon turns, I name you again."
I stared at him.
"You want me to go back and sit quietly while your brother's wife wears my pendant."
"Until the moon turns."
"That's twenty-three days."
"Isla."
"She sleeps in my rooms for twenty-three days, and I wait in the guest wing."
He had the grace to look at the ground.
Maud stepped up beside him.
She wore her good grey coat, with her hair pinned flat, and her voice was soft enough to carry across the water.
"Isla, darling. You've had a terrible loss this year, and last night was a great deal. Nobody here blames you."
She turned to the guard.
"The Luna is unwell. Grief does this. She doesn't know what she's saying."
A murmur ran along the line.
That was what I had been expecting.
Maud had always done it that way.
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