Allissa
The room had nearly finished finding its rhythm when the herald’s staff struck the floor again, and the name he announced stopped every conversation in the hall.
“King Milo and Queen Winifred.”
Lyle was with them. He’d slipped out of the ballroom sometime earlier, without a word to anyone, and gone to walk his mother in himself. She stood at the top of the stairs on my brother-in-law’s arm in a gown of soft dove gray, her silvered hair dressed simply, her chin lifted by visible effort, a woman walking back into a world that she has largely been absent from. Milo stood at her other side. Lyle held the arm she leaned on, and even from across the ballroom I could see what that arm was costing him, and that he would have died before withdrawing it.
For one heartbeat, the hall did n
