Clara pressed trembling fingers against her forehead. Her thoughts felt jagged and uneven, crashing into one another too quickly to follow.
“When?” she asked. “When did you find her?”
Daniel answered this time.
“About a month ago.”
Clara stared at him.
“A month?”
“I didn’t know who she was at first,” he said quickly. “She collapsed near the train station. I was helping at the community center that day and they called for volunteers because someone needed medical assistance—”
Clara closed her eyes.
Of course.
Daniel had inherited every dangerous softness his mother spent years trying to suppress in herself.
“When I checked her ID…” he continued carefully, “I saw the last name.”
“And you brought her here.”
“She had nowhere to go.”
“She always finds somewhere to go.”
The bitterness in Clara’s voice sliced through the room.
Her mother flinched visibly.
For one fleeting second guilt twisted through Clara’s chest.
Then memory crushed it.
Eight years earlier, Clara had stood in another apartment while her mother calmly explained why she had chosen to stay with a violent man who terrified everyone around him.
“He needs me,” Elena had said then.
And Clara had realized, with horrifying clarity, that her mother would always choose chaos over safety.
Even over her own daughter.
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