Neither woman rushed to break the silence. They didn't need to. They had lived long enough, carried enough, seen enough, that they understood silence had its own meaning.
It wasn't emptiness. It wasn't absence. Sometimes silence was fuller than words, holding everything they didn't say in an easier, steadier way than speaking it out loud.
The important words had already been spoken earlier, and the rest now hung in the air between them like threads too heavy to cut.
Two mothers, two keepers of secrets that could never be written down, sat together in that study.
They weren't only bound by shared power, or by circumstance, but by something deeper.
By the same vow, neither of them had ever spoken aloud, but both carried down to their marrow: to shield him, and to shield the girls who would soon have no choice but to walk into the same storm.
