The temperature in the whole alcove seems to drop ten degrees.
Tilda stares at me like she is very seriously considering whether she could kill me with a padded toy block and still make dinner.
“That,” she says, each word clean and hard, “is not a question you get to ask.”
The child watches us with those impossible golden eyes.
I hear myself say, quieter, “Tilda.”
“No.”
One word. Flat as a locked door.
But now I’m looking and looking and I can’t stop. The scales. The eyes. The age. The timing clawing its way up out of memory whether I invite it or not.
When did she leave?
How long after?
How old is he?
No. No, that’s insane.
Except my body does not seem to think it’s insane. My body is all alarm bells and old ghosts and ugly hope, and hope is a vicious thing. Hope will put its hands around your throat and call it salvation.
The child speaks again, peering at me from the safe height of Tilda’s shoulder. “Who dat?”
My breath catches.
Tilda doesn’t look away from me when she answers. “Nobody you need to worry about.”
Nobody.
That one goes in under the ribs.
I almost laugh, because fair enough. If anyone has earned that, it’s me.
Still, I can’t make my feet move.
The boy—because he is a boy, and because there is something about seeing that scale pattern on a little body that makes my brain feel split open—tilts his head. The light catches one eye. Gold like mine. Not exactly mine. But close enough that my skin goes cold.
I hear my own pulse.
I hear children playing farther out in the courtyard.
I hear a caretaker calling someone named Lio away from a climbing wall.
I hear Tilda’s breathing—controlled, shallow, furious.
And under all of it, I hear the terrible click of pieces trying to fit together in my head.
We were together.
She left.
No explanation worth a damn.
She vanished.
