I stay where I am because moving seems ambitious.
A caretaker passes behind me pushing a supply cart full of folded blankets and doesn’t even glance my way. Somewhere in the courtyard, one of the children shrieks with laughter. A fountain gurgles gently in the middle distance, cheerful as a threat written in pastel.
I drag a hand over my mouth.
“No,” I say to absolutely no one.
Then, because the word has no authority over what’s happening in my skull, I say it again.
“No.”
Golden eyes.
Red scales.
The age of him.
The way she looked at me.
The way she answered too fast and not at all.
The way my whole body knew before my brain could build a defense.
I start walking without picking a direction, just moving because the alternative is standing there and detonating. Out through the commons, past the fountain, around a seating cluster full of toys. My shoulders feel too wide for the air. My skin feels hot and wrong.
Could he be mine?
The thought is monstrous. Glorious. Terrifying.
Impossible.
Possible.
I hate both answers.
By the time I hit the corridor back toward contestant housing, my heartbeat has gone from startled to violent. Every memory I have of Tilda comes back with teeth. Her leaving. The silence after. The months I spent telling myself she was done with me because she was smarter than I was, steadier than I was, finished with being dragged through my chaos.
Never once?—
Not once?—
Did I think child.
I stop dead in the middle of the hall.
A camera drone swivels toward me. I stare at it until it veers off, apparently deciding there are easier meals elsewhere.
Then I laugh once, low and unbelieving.
“If that kid is mine,” I say under my breath, “I am going to lose my entire mind.”
Which, to be fair, assumes I still have one to lose.
Because now every detail feels suspect. Every absence. Every evasion. Every time she’s cut a conversation short. Every time she’s looked wrung out and refused to tell me why. Every timeshe’s vanished into the family wing and come back with her face rebuilt from scratch.
A child.
Her child.
