Chapter 206

• Two weeks had slipped by in a haze of raw emotion and endless training, leaving only three weeks until the Advanced Showdown. I glared at the crumpled note lying on my bedside table, hating it and hating myself for ruining my one chance to read it. My mom had
• written it before she rushed off to help with the rogue attack. But in my blind rage that day, I knocked over countless half-empty coffee cups, drenching the note in my negligence. It lay there, overlooked and soaked, for nearly a month before I could summon the courage—or desperation—to finally return and find it.
• A scream of frustration clawed at my throat, aimed at both my mom and myself. She’d always had this habit of leaving half-finished cups scattered around the house, starting a new one before she finished the last. Now, the dark ink on the thin sheet had blurred and dried into an illegible, fragile mess. Only a few words stood out on the page—"Sorry," "forget," and "remember"—but none made any sense. They were the only words that hadn’t been stained, preserved like remnants of her voice reaching out from the past. Yet they meant everything and nothing, those fragments of what she’d wanted me to know, left behind in case something went wrong. Now, her last words to me were useless.