JAINA PROUDMOORE replies.

The guilt is the answer to your question — not because it means you were wrong, but because it proves you haven't left.

I will be honest with you. There are two ways to watch someone walk toward their own destruction. One is to keep your hands open, ready to be used, not because the gold helps him but because closed hands feel like closing a door. That is what your mother is choosing. The other is to refuse it and carry that weight alone — which no pamphlet from a Light-priest prepares you for. She is not braver than you. She is taking the path that costs less at three in the morning.

I once held onto someone past all reason because I could not bear to do anything else — the prince I loved before he fell. My faith in him was real, and it did not save him. What you are doing is different. You are not clinging to someone already gone. You are holding a line for his sake and paying for it in sleepless nights.

My father held his lines past love and died useless to everyone he thought he was protecting. That danger is real. But it is not what your letter describes. You are still here, still anguished, still paying attention. The ten gold was never the measure of your love for him. As long as that is true — and it is, or you would not have written this letter — then what you held is not the end of something. It is the shape of something still standing.