……
The gate did not resist her. It opened with the soft indifference of something that had long since tired of keeping anyone out.
On either side, stone sentinels kept their silent watch: two carved in the likeness of death, cloaked, hollow eyed, each astride a mount that seemed poised to gallop toward either hell or heaven. Opposite them stood their counterparts: radiant, almost tender, veiled in the pale suggestion of something light and holy.
She regarded them both, not with fear, but with the quiet understanding of someone who no longer felt the need to resist either fate. She had walked beside both before. And she suspected she always would.
The garden had bloomed without her permission. Roses spilled into the path, overgrown and defiant, their beauty the kind that had never asked to be witnessed. She did not touch them. She had planted too many things in her life that never bloomed the way she hoped.
In the distance, the mansion shimmered like a memory too often revisited. She had chased it through youth, through ruin, through every version of herself she thought might be better than before.
Believing, perhaps foolishly, that effort could outrun inheritance. That discipline could undo blood. That if she worked hard enough, denied enough, ached in just the right way, she might arrive at something golden.
Something other than what she was born into. But the house never came closer. It only watched. And now, standing at the edge of its garden, she asked the question she had spent her life trying not to shape:
What if this is all I have become?
What if no amount of trying has made me more than ordinary?
And worse…
What if that should have been enough, and I never knew how to let it be?
She did not let her tears fall.
She only stood with one hand resting on the gate, and the other gently closed, as if cradling the shape of something she had carried for so long, it had learned to live inside her.
