ACT XI: Only You Love Me Right
There is a kind of worship that doesn't need temples.
It happens instead in kitchens, under blankets, beside steaming mugs and hands that know exactly how to soothe. It begins with a girl, barely five, wrapped in fleece and full of unreasonable demands — and it blooms inside the one who says yes to every single one.
The Langford estate knows the rituals now. Each morning, a velvet-robed whirlwind with eyes like dusk storms across the marble foyer, bound not for a throne, but for a gate already ajar. There, waiting — always waiting — is the sunbeam she calls her own.
She does not knock. She does not ask.
Because true devotion never does.
Their days are composed like lullabies: lavender syrup, pinky promises, sticker bribes, and the hush of custom lullabies sung into crescent-shaped pillows. One offers the world. The other claims it with the solemnity of a vow. And between them, a love so intense, so unfiltered, it frays the edges of everything else.
From the outside, it looks indulgent — spoiled, even. But from within, it is something ancient. A private covenant written in shared glances, whispered Latin, and crumbs stolen from warm hands.
And yet, even in this paradise of affection, something darker hums. The world wants its rules obeyed. The world does not care for children who love too loudly, too deeply, too exclusively.
So when the grown women — mother and aunt, mentor and guardian — watch their child clutch her beloved like salvation, they know: this isn't merely a phase. It's a reckoning.
Love like this does not fade.
It writes scripture in the bones.
And She, child of aching intensity, refuses anything less than total.
So she names her god.
And it's not fear. Not obedience. Not compromise.
It's her.
And no one — no rule, no future — will take her away.