Chapter 99. Invitation

Lila’s POV

Something that feels like us.

The invitation came as a surprise. It came on a thick, cream-coloured card, by hand. Dinner. My HOME. 7 PM. -H.

A solitary, harsh initial. For a whole week, my mother and I had glanced at it as if it were a bomb. Ryder’s Aunt Helena, the woman who’d fired my mother and stared at me as if I were a disease, was asking us to dinner. Ryder, meanwhile, looked at me and shook his head, a slow, easy smile spreading across his mouth.

“She’s working on it, Lila. It’s going to be strange. Let’s go.”

And now, here we were. A month after graduation, I was coming up the stone path to the house that had always seemed like a stronghold. My hand was steady in my mother’s. My lungs were clear. The low fever that I’d had for years had been nothing more than a bad memory. I was still a tybrid, and I still had a clock, but the hands were moving slower, and I was finally in charge of my own time. Ryder opened the door before w