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"Come on, sit down. You're making me nervous, standing there where I can't see you.”
Kaye took another step back, into deeper darkness. "I'm fine here.”
"She never told me about Kate. Can you imagine that? Nothing! How could she not tell me about my own flesh and blood? The spitting image of you at that age. Such a sweet little girl, growing up robbed of a family to love her. It hurts my heart to think of it.”
Kaye nodded again, stupidly, numbly. Robbed. And Kaye was the robber, the shoplifter of Kate's childhood. "Did Ellen say why Kate is here now?”
"I'd thought she'd have told you—Kate's dad checked himself into a rehab. He had promised not to bother Ellen, but he did and I'm glad. Kate's a strange child and she's clearly been raised terribly. Do you know that all she'll eat is soybeans and flower petals? What kind of diet is that for a growing girl?”
Kaye wanted to scream. The disconnect between the normalcy of the things her grandmother was saying and what she knew to be true seemed unendurable. Why would her mother tell her grandmother a story like that? Had someone enchanted her to believe that was the truth? Magic choked Kaye, the words that would conjure silence sharp in her mouth. But she swallowed them, because she also wanted her grandmother to keep talking, wanted everything to be normal for one more minute.
"Is Ellen happy?" Kaye asked quietly instead. "To have . . . Kate?”
Her grandmother snorted. "She was never really ready to be a mother. How will she manage in that little apartment? I'm sure she's happy to have Kate—what mother wouldn't be happy to have her child? But she's forgetting how much work it all is. They're going to have to move back here, I'm sure.”
With growing dread, Kaye realized that Corny had been right all along. Giving her mother a changeling child had been a terrible plan. Ellen had just been getting ahead with her job and the band, and a kid completely derailed that. Kaye'd screwed up, really screwed up in a way she had no idea how to fix.
"Kate's going to look up to you," her grandmother said. "You can't be running around anymore, missing important family things. We don't need two wild children.”
"Stop! Stop!" Kaye said, but there was no magic in her words. She put her hands over her ears. "Just stop. Kate isn't going to look up to me—”
"Kaye?" Ellen called from the top of the stairs.
Panicked, Kaye headed for the kitchen door. She yanked it open, glad for the cold air on her burning face. Right then she hated everyone— hated Corny for being right, Roiben for being gone, her mother and grandmother for having replaced her. Most of all, she hated herself for letting all those things happen.
"Kaye Fierch!" Ellen shouted from the doorway in her seldom-used "mom" voice. "You get back in here right now.”
Kaye stopped automatically.
"I'm sorry I lost it," Ellen said, and Kaye turned toward her, saw the distress in her face. "I handled things badly, I admit that. Please don't leave. I don't want you to leave.”
"Why not?" Kaye asked softly. Her throat felt tight.
Ellen shook her head, walking out into the yard. "I want you to explain. What you were going to tell me last time, at my apartment—tell me now.”
"Okay," Kaye said. "When I was little, I got switched with the—the human—and you raised me, instead of the—the human girl. I didn't know until we moved back here and met other faeries.”
"Faeries," Ellen echoed. "Are you sure that's what you are? A faery? How can you tell?”
Kaye held up one green hand, turning it over. "What else would I be? An alien? A green girl from Mars?”
Ellen took a deep breath and let it out all at once. "I don't know. I don't know what to make of any of this.”
"I'm not human," Kaye said, those words seeming to cut to the thing that was the most terrible and incomprehensible about the truth.
"But you sound—" Ellen stopped, correcting herself. "Of course you sound like you. You are you.”
"I know," Kaye said. "But I'm not who you thought I was, right?”
Ellen shook her head. "When I saw Kate, I was so afraid. I figured you did something dumb to get her back from whatever had her, didn't you? See, I know you. You.”
"Her name's not Kate. She's Kaye. The real—”
Ellen held up one hand. "You didn't answer my question.”
"Yeah." Kaye sighed. "I did something pretty dumb.”
"See, you're exactly who I think you are." Ellen's arms went around Kaye's shoulders and she laughed her deep, cigarette-rough laugh. "You're my girl."
