Maya would have felt guilty for leaving the way she had if not for the importance of it.
That was the first thing sitting quietly inside her as she stood among them again, one hand held by Phei, her silver hair falling softly down her shoulders while the morning light of Infinity Chaos Hotel poured across the penthouse glass and turned the room into a bright, expensive cage of warmth.
Guilt was a strange thing and it was never roaring; sometimes it slipped in quietly, sat beside the heart, folded its hands and waited to be noticed like a well-mannered poison.
She had disappeared for hours and worse, because of whatever had happened, because of the shroud that had wrapped around memory itself, she had vanished from their minds as though she had never belonged there.
And yet, when she returned, they had not looked at her like a stranger.
That was what surprised her most.
Unlike what Maya had expected from Phei's women and the princesses, they had actually missed her:
