Even as a child, the counting was there.
The room comes into focus gradually, details sharpening like a photograph developing in solution.
Wood-paneled walls, warm with age and care. A fireplace crackling softly in the corner, casting dancing shadows across plush carpeting. Bookshelves lined with leather-bound volumes and strange artifacts—things I didn't understand then and still don't fully understand now. The smell of pipe tobacco and something sweeter, something floral that I'll later learn was my mother's preferred blade oil.
Home.
Ourhome.
The one that burned the same night they died.
I'm sitting on a leather ottoman, positioned in front of a massive armchair that seems to swallow the man occupying it. He's reading something—papers, maybe, or documents—but he looks up when he feels my attention on him.
Dad.
The word catches in my throat.
He looks exactly how I remember him—tall even when seated, with broad shoulders and kind eyes that crinkle at the corners when he smiles. His hair is dark, shot through with silver at the temples, and there's a scar along his jawline that he always said he got "negotiating with difficult people."
Negotiating.
Even then, he was protecting me from the truth of what he did.
Whatwedid.
What the Eastman name really meant.
"Sera."
His voice is warm.
Real.
So impossibly, devastatingly real that I feel tears prick at the corners of eyes I can't control, attached to a body that isn't mine anymore—or maybe was always mine, just smaller, just softer, just before the world taught me to be hard.
"Daddy?"
The word comes out high-pitched.
Childish.
The voice of the girl I used to be, before death and violence and the academy stripped away everything soft.
He sets aside his papers, giving me his full attention—something he always did, no matter how busy he was, no matter how many "negotiations" demanded his time. When he looked at me, I was the only thing that existed.
I didn't understand how rare that was until I lost it.
"You've been quiet today," he observes, tilting his head in that way he had—curious but patient, never pushing. "Something on your mind?"
My small hands fidget in my lap.
I watch them move—watch myself move—from somewhere both inside and outside this moment. Part of me is the child experiencing this for the first time. Part of me is the woman watching it unfold like a ghost at her own memory.
"Mrs. Peterson said something today," I mumble, not meeting his eyes. "At school."
"Oh?" He leans forward, elbows on knees, bringing himself closer to my level. "What did Mrs. Peterson say?"
I kick my feet.
