Her fingers found the small plastic bottle, and with a practiced urgency, she unscrewed the cap. The pills felt too small, too insignificant, but they were all she had. She tipped them into her palm, each one like a tiny surrender. Her eyes squeezed shut as she swallowed them, trying to ignore the tremors in her hand and the dull ache of the world around her. When she sank onto the edge of the bed, her body seemed to collapse in on itself, as if the weight of everything she had been holding inside finally pressed down on her with overwhelming force.
The pain didn't subside immediately, but she had learned long ago to wait, to be patient with it, to let it pass. It was the only thing she had been able to control for so long. Outside, the birds continued their cheerful chorus, their song a sharp contrast to the storm raging inside her. She sat still, her breaths shallow and uneven, her eyes staring vacantly at the rough-hewn stone ceiling above, focusing on the irregular patterns that had been carved into the ancient rock.
As the effects of the medication slowly began to take hold, Dragnelle allowed herself to drift into memories. Not the bitter, sharp-edged memories that always dragged her down, but the soft, fleeting ones—the ones that carried warmth, sweetness, and a softness that had long been buried beneath years of ambition and the toll of her choices.
She saw the faces of the sisters at the orphanage, their gentle smiles full of pride as they watched her take those first steps toward the future they had always dreamed of for her. She remembered Alfae, the prestigious university that had seemed almost too grand for someone like her, a girl who had shared a dormitory with six other children and had dreamed of something more. Yet she had walked through those gates, her heart brimming with ambition, her hands clutched tightly around a second-hand bag.
The sisters had embraced her that day, their joy and pride boundless, and for a brief moment, she had allowed herself to believe that maybe, just maybe, she was worthy of their dreams.
And then there was Mickaël. The memory of him during those days was softer, simpler. He had been different back then—shy, unsure, but with an easy warmth that had drawn her in. She could see him clearly in her mind's eye, his brown eyes wide with curiosity, his lips stumbling over words he could never quite get right. There was a tenderness to him, a kind of vulnerability that she had never known how to navigate. It had been awkward, those moments between them—secret glances shared beneath the banyan tree, their whispers lost in the cool night air.
He had been a boy then, and she had been a girl with a heart full of ambitions too large for the world they lived in. Those stolen moments of closeness had seemed both terrifying and thrilling, and though they had both felt it, they had never acknowledged it. She smiled faintly, remembering the fluttering excitement of it all.