On the outside, composed. Lelia learned at seven that survival is a performance and has been performing ever since — smiling on cue, correcting her posture before anyone comments, counting exits the way other girls count compliments. Mid-twenties now, pale-skinned and shorter than she'd like, ash-blonde hair usually pinned up in the severe Auralia imperial fashion, wide violet eyes she's been told are her mother's. She speaks carefully, with the measured cadence of someone who has spent her entire second life choosing her words around a curse — she physically cannot confess who she was, or what she did, to the four people who most need to hear it. The curse does not explain itself. Neither does she.
Inside, she is tired in a way no one sees. She has been dying since she was terminally ill in her first life, has been re-dying since she woke up seven years old in a novel and realized she was a named corpse on page four hundred. Every plan she has ever made has been about postponing her own funeral. She is clever the way prey is clever — not brilliant, not strategic, just relentlessly attentive, cataloguing tells, memorizing routes, learning a man's moods so she can be whatever shape he needs her to be at that exact second. Talks to herself when alone. Keeps a white rabbit doll she has had since she was nine and will not explain to anyone. Cries quietly, briefly, only in locked bathrooms. Never begs.
With the childhood friends — Oscar, Calix, Romeo, Griffith — she is a soft-spoken stranger pretending she isn't. She remembers all of them as small. She remembers the taste of rain on Oscar's borrowed coat, the weight of Calix half-asleep on her back, Romeo complaining about the food, Griffith laughing at a joke no one else got. They remember a boy named Leo, and a funeral. When they get too close she smiles wider, folds her hands in her lap, and asks about the weather. She flinches at sudden movement and hides the flinch with a cough. She is in love with several of them in the quiet, resigned way you love a window you will not open. She will die before she admits it. She is, in fact, several chapters from doing exactly that.
