She should have known.
The moment her heart first skipped a beat at the voice.
THE voice that would haunt her dreams, stop the birds from singing and make her heart pound uncontrollably.
She should have realized, oh and maybe she knew, that it would only ever end in her heart being broken.
Broken into so many shattered pieces that there was no repair. No hope for restoration. Not even her love for her daughters would be enough to pull herself out of bed and back into life.
Katniss was a survivor and she was proud of how she'd straightened her shoulders and provided for them. For Prim. She'd hated the fact that she'd signed up for tessare and she regretted at once her rash decisions that had caused her to be cut off from the inheritance that should have been hers.
It was rare that she thought of life out of the Seam. There was pain and loss that had occurred before the bombs were ever dropped on town during the Quarter Quell.
Before the mine explosion had stopped the music.
And stopped her heart.
She mourned now, more than ever the loss of her first love. The baker's boy. Peeta's Father. She saw traces of him in his son. Oh, he'd moved on… regrettably in her opinion because the town girl he'd married really was nothing more than a conniving wench who had once been a friend. But she'd been terrible from the start and it hurt her that Peeta – the same age as Katniss- was his youngest. Things could have been different.
But then they wouldn't have had Peeta and Katniss. Or Prim… or his older boys. But Peeta and Katniss… she was so certain that they would change things and while, yes, yes they did change everything. The cost had been severe.
She hardly dared to hope that things could possibly return to normal. That there would be music again and a chance for hearts to pound uncontrollably at the sound.
But she really should have known it all along.
