Super suspicious of how un-Bethany Bethany was being. I feel like Nyla paid for her temporary absence... -cubeswhump
@cubeswhump She did, but not as badly as you might suspect! Nyla’s migraines were basically the ONLY thing Bethany was ever more-or-less “forgiving” about. She’d grown up friends with someone who’d gotten TERRIBLE migraines from a very young age, and it’s one of the only things Bethany can actually feel, like, human empathy for. Obviously Nyla hates them in their entirety, but when she was in the middle of a migraine it was just about the only time Bethany acted kindly towards her.
That, and this is set EARLY in the slaves’ narrative. Bethany didn’t start out as bad as she ended, it was something where she got slowly worse over a long period of time, but by the end she was the damnable monster the readership is familiar with. When Nyla was 15, it was still only her and Greyson living with Bethany, and she was awful, but not like, heinous just yet. Greyson knew a kinder version of Bethany than Nyla knew, than Sasha knew, than Evan knew, and Lilah effectively only knew her at her worst.
