married off his daughter

beggar, Yusha?” she asked. Her voice was hollow, a reed snapping in the wind.

The silence that followed was long and heavy, thick with the things left unsaid.

“I told you once,” he said, his voice stripped of its poetic warmth. “Not always.”

“My sister found me today. She told me you are a lie. She told me you are hiding. That you use me—my darkness—to continue reading …