Branch: Shifting Mirrors (Emily, Riley, Myra)

Emily found herself in a house she had never visited, but which she recognized instantly—by scent, by the subtle friction of the carpet underfoot, by the hush that fell in the seconds between one parent's voice and the other.

A strand of hair fell across her face as she turned to take in the surroundings. She reached back to tuck it behind her ear, fingers automatically continuing their path down to where her hair had once ended, finding nothing but air. She pulled a lock forward over her shoulder, examining it with a frown. Barely reaching her butt now, a full handspan shorter than before. "Great," she muttered under her breath. "Can't afford to fail any more rooms."

A marine layer clung to the La Jolla coast outside, tinting the sunset gold and purple. The windows caught this light and threw it everywhere, so the walls, the art, the glass-top table all seemed to be dipped in honey. It was dusk, and somewhere in the distance waves crashed, muffled and steady, like a heart trying not to alarm its owner.

In the dining room, Emi sat at the head of the table, sleeves rolled, hair a little frizzed from the drive. Her mother and father were at their usual posts: the mother busy with a last-minute salad, the father uncorking a bottle of wine and explaining (for the third time) why cabernet was wasted on "fish and salad night." The parents were not unkind, not by any means. But the air between them buzzed with the ache of something unspoken—a pact to ignore the child who had once needed them, now transformed into a grown woman with mysteries they could not hope to solve.

“Are you eating enough?” her father asked, voice bluff but softened by age. “Your cheeks look hollow, darling.”

“I eat all the time, Dad,” Emi replied, bright and effortless. “You should see the mountains of takeout boxes in my kitchen. The rats could unionize.” She offered her mother a smile, which was returned with the distracted speed of a mom who had already moved on to a new anxiety.

“Do you see anyone from college these days?” her mother asked. “The girl with the dyed-green hair? She seemed fun.”

Emi shook her head. “Not really. We lost touch after she joined that rock-climbing cult.” The line landed, as intended, and her father laughed. Her mother didn’t seem to register the joke, or the fact that she had been handed a new lead, which she promptly ran with.

“And boys?” she ventured. “Or girls, if that’s where you’re at. You know we don’t care, sweetie. Just as long as someone makes you happy.”

Emily, watching from her liminal perch at the dining room’s edge, felt a sting behind her eyes. Emi’s parents were trying, but they were playing a game whose rules had been rewritten in a language they never studied. What they wanted was a report card: evidence of normalcy, dates circled on the calendar, proof of a future that looked enough like their own that they could relax. What they got instead was the most delicate performance of wellness Emily had ever seen.

“No one lately,” Emi replied, pushing a cube of tofu around her plate. “I think I’m focusing on work too much. My agent wants a new pitch by August.”

Her mother’s eyes flicked to her father, then back to the salad. “That’s good,” she said, a little too brightly. “You always did best when you put your head down and worked. You get that from me.”

“Sure do, Mom.” Emi’s voice held no trace of sarcasm, but the speed with which she forked food into her mouth said everything else. The rest of the meal proceeded in this vein: the parents volleyed worries and encouragements, Emi fielded them with flawless returns. Each time a subject threatened to veer into the territory of real feeling—loneliness, the ache of lost friends, the hollowed-out days when the sketches wouldn’t come—Emi deployed another bright story, another update from her carefully constructed life. If her hands trembled, it was only when her parents weren’t looking. If her eyes shimmered, it was just the sunset reflecting from the sea.

By the time dessert arrived (store-bought mochi, cut into neat quarters and served on a tray meant for canapés), Emi had run out of small talk. She excused herself, kissing her mother’s cheek and enduring her father’s rib-crushing hug, and disappeared up the stairs with a careful, practiced calm.

Emily followed, drawn by the gravity of unfinished business. She took the stairs slowly, counting each tread, memorizing the way the carpet gave just a little with every step. At the top, Emi’s bedroom was a time capsule, untouched since college: posters of Studio Ghibli films, shelves of manga stacked in double rows, a dusty telescope still aimed at the window though the blinds had long since been drawn. On the bed, Emi sat cross-legged, head bowed, her hair curtaining her face as she thumbed through a battered sketchbook.

The room was dim, the only light coming from the streetlamp outside. But Emily could see the real scene anyway, clear as day: the way Emi’s shoulders hunched, the careful way she picked at her jeans, the way she pressed the heel of her palm to her eye before turning another page.

Emily entered and sat beside her, careful not to disturb the piles of art supplies or the stacks of old notebooks. She didn’t speak. She just let her presence fill the silence, hoping it might be enough.

For a long while, Emi said nothing. She flipped through the sketchbook, her hand barely steady, and let the pages fall as they would. Every third or fourth page she’d pause, then run her fingers over the lines, as if trying to remember what it felt like to believe in them. The drawings themselves were beautiful, but they had a nervous energy—a frantic attempt to capture something fleeting, as if each image was chasing a ghost that would never hold still.

At last, Emi broke the silence, her voice so small it barely stirred the air. “It never gets easier,” she whispered, “pretending to be okay. I wish they could just see it for once. I wish someone would look at me and know that I’m not as together as I act.”

Emily reached out and touched the edge of the sketchbook, gentle as a breath. “You don’t have to pretend with me,” she said, the words simple but true. “I see you, Emi. I always have.”

Emi blinked hard, then gave a little laugh that was half relief, half shame. “That’s the problem,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to see me like this. If I start asking for help now, it’s like admitting I never really left.”

Emily shook her head. “No. It means you’re human. It means you’re alive.”

Emi let the sketchbook fall to the bed. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, a pose that was at once childish and ancient. “Sometimes I feel like I’m living two lives. The one everyone sees, and the one that’s just… me, in the dark, hoping no one finds out how scared I am.”

“I get that,” Emily said, and it was the truth. “But I think that’s everyone, Emi. Even the people who look perfect on the outside.”

A silence grew between them, heavy but not unwelcome. For the first time, Emi let herself sag against Emily’s shoulder, the contact warm and real. She didn’t cry, not quite, but Emily felt the shudder that ran through her as if she had. “I just wish I knew what to do next,” Emi said, her voice muffled by the sleeve of her shirt.

“Maybe you don’t have to decide tonight,” Emily replied. “Maybe you just get through the day, and tomorrow you figure it out again.”

Emi gave a small, grateful smile. “That sounds manageable,” she said. “Maybe I can do that.”

They sat like that for a while, the only sound the faraway hiss of tires on wet pavement and the occasional crack of a palm tree in the wind. The weight in the room hadn’t vanished, but it had shifted—lighter, somehow, or at least more evenly distributed. Emily didn’t try to fix anything. She just stayed, her hand resting on the sketchbook, as if holding shut all the ghosts and old stories that might try to escape.

After a while, Emi’s breathing slowed. Her shoulders dropped. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” Emily replied.

In the darkness, a new silence settled over them—quiet, not empty.

The bedroom dissolved, edges bleeding into nothing until there was only the chime of Emily's footsteps on glass and the humming that lived in her bones. She stood in the Garden of Glass, her body still warm from Emi's weight against her shoulder, her mind still half-buried in that small, dark room where pretense had finally cracked.

The mirrors tilted toward her like they were listening—larger now than before, their edges less jagged, arranged into something almost like a path. She moved through them slowly, her bare feet singing against the floor with each step, and felt the absence of cold in the fog like a small mercy. Whispers threaded through the humming: "I see you," someone said, and "It means you're alive," and beneath it all, a voice so young it might have been a child's: "Always together." The pillars glowed softly in their spiral, patient and waiting, and Emily—still fragile from witnessing Emi's fracture and reconstruction, still tender from offering presence instead of answers—reached for the flashing shard that would take her into the next room, her hand steady despite the trembling in her chest.

Riley had known kitchens like this, and the body remembered long after the mind stopped wanting to. The linoleum was worn to transparency in the track between sink and fridge, revealing the original tile underneath like the ghost of a better time. A table jammed against the far wall carried the debris of a siege: half-crumbled bills, rubber-banded junk mail, off-brand cereal half-eaten and already soggy in its bowl. There were dishes everywhere—counters, open dishwasher, even the stove—and none of them seemed to belong together, orphaned by a system that only sometimes worked.

Riley’s shoes stuck a little with every step, the floor underfoot slick with a thin, invisible oil—maybe butter, maybe desperation. Overhead, a flickering light stuttered on and off in rhythm with the rattle of the fridge. Outside, rain hissed against the fogged windowpane, running in streaks through the finger-grease and the dried-on handprints.

Young Dawn sat at the table, elbows planted wide to make a fortress around a battered composition book. Her head was down, neck bent so far Riley could see the knuckles along her spine straining against the hoodie. Dawn’s hair, not yet up in the utilitarian ponytail Riley had always known, hung straight and limp, plastered to the side of her face by sweat. She held a pencil in her right hand, grinding the lead in tight, looping circles as she tried to solve a long division problem on a wrinkled worksheet. But even from across the kitchen Riley could see: it wasn’t homework. The paper was a ledger, the margins crammed with small, frantic notes. Dawn was doing math to make something possible that wasn’t.

The apartment’s air was warm and heavy. There was the undertone of mildew, the sharper bite of dish soap, and that unique, stomach-clenching funk that came from unemptied trash mixed with the sweetness of cereal left out too long. Somewhere deeper in the house, a TV buzzed with canned laughter, and the thump of footsteps meant siblings—more kids than there were bedrooms, probably, and none of them old enough to fend for themselves.

Riley hated it. The injustice. That was always the first response—anger, clean and blinding, pointed at whatever parent or universe had decided this was what Dawn deserved. But looking at the girl, Riley felt the anger dissolve, replaced by a thick sadness. It wasn’t just that Dawn had to do this—watch the numbers refuse to add up, decide what bill to pay and what to risk—what hurt was the way she’d already accepted it. The fatigue in her body said this was an old fight, maybe even a losing one, but she fought it anyway.

Dawn’s left hand pinched the bridge of her nose, and Riley saw the shadow of a bruise there—no accident, just the chronic aftereffect of rubbing the same spot day after day, hoping for a different outcome. Her lips moved, counting under her breath, the sound barely audible over the fridge and the distant TV. The pencil moved faster, erasing, then rewriting, then finally jabbing down so hard the tip snapped with an audible crack.

Dawn flinched, let the pencil roll out of her grip, and then just stared at the mess. For a long moment she didn’t move, shoulders shuddering with a breath that barely cleared her lungs. She looked so small. Riley forgot, sometimes, how thin Dawn was before adulthood had given her the power to eat regularly and sleep more than four hours a night. She was skin, bone, stubbornness.

Riley stepped forward, careful to make the movement slow, nonthreatening. She pulled out the other kitchen chair and sat, the plastic groaning under the shift in weight. She didn’t speak. Dawn still hadn’t noticed her, not really; she was in the tunnel, all available senses trained on the deficit that no pencil, no matter how sharp, could ever erase.

Riley wanted to touch her, to gather the girl up and hold her until the world stopped hurting, but Dawn didn’t seem like the type to accept help—not at this age, not ever. Instead, Riley waited. Let the silence do what it needed to.

Finally, Dawn looked up. Her eyes were red, not from crying but from rubbing and from the relentless gravity of not being enough. Riley recognized that look: the look of someone who knew exactly how badly they were failing and refused to let it stop them. It was a kind of heroism Riley herself had never managed.

Dawn didn’t say anything at first. She glanced at the ledger, then at the window, then back to the page, as if scanning for an exit that didn’t exist.

“You’re not going to make it balance,” Riley said, soft but certain. “No matter how many times you try.”

Dawn’s jaw worked. “It’s supposed to. If I…” She trailed off, stared at the broken pencil tip. “I can’t mess this up again.”

Riley shook her head. “You’re not messing it up. No one could do this—not alone.”

Dawn’s face twisted, the muscles in her cheeks clenching like a cramp. She tried to smile, but the effort collapsed before it could become anything real.

“They need me to,” she whispered. “Dad can’t, so I have to. Luis is too little and Seb just—he’s a kid. He doesn’t even know how bad it is.”

“You’re a kid too,” Riley said. There was no accusation in it. “You shouldn’t have to be the one holding it together.”

Dawn’s mouth twitched, caught between protest and apology. “If I don’t, who will?”

Riley remembered the line from her own past, from the day after her mother’s funeral, when she’d woken up and found there was still trash to take out, still bills to be paid, still clothes to fold and a house to clean for no one. No one had offered to do it for her, and she’d never thought to ask. In the world Riley grew up in, you carried the weight or you got crushed.

But Dawn—she carried all of it. And no matter how many years had passed, it was written into her, the bone-deep knowledge that there was never enough to go around and if you dropped the ball, someone else paid the price.

Riley’s voice softened. “You can’t keep all the plates spinning. Not forever.”

Dawn looked at her like she didn’t believe it. Or maybe she just couldn’t imagine what it would be like to let one fall.

A door banged somewhere in the hallway. A little boy’s voice—Luis?—yelled “Dawn, I’m hungry!” in a pitch that made both girls wince. Dawn’s hand shot out, flipping closed the ledger with a snap, as if the sound alone could erase the evidence of her failure. The pencil rolled and nearly fell, but Riley caught it, handing it back before Dawn could even look up.

Dawn muttered “Thanks,” and Riley almost missed it. She watched as Dawn stood, shoulders squared, hoodie falling over her hands like bandages. Without a word, Dawn dug in a cabinet and found a packet of instant oatmeal, then poured it into a chipped bowl, added water from the tap, and jammed it into the microwave. The routine was automatic. Every movement measured. When the microwave beeped, Dawn grabbed the bowl with bare hands, barely noticing the heat, and brought it into the next room.

Riley followed at a distance, trying not to crowd her. She saw two brothers, one bigger and one small, curled on a collapsing futon, sharing a single threadbare blanket. The TV was turned up way too loud. Dawn handed the bowl to the younger boy, who tore into it like he hadn’t eaten all day. The older one looked at Dawn, then at Riley, and then rolled his eyes as if embarrassed by the whole display.

“Go do your homework,” Dawn ordered, and the boy grumbled but obeyed. Riley saw the flash of guilt in his eyes—he hated that Dawn had to be the adult, but there was no other adult left.

Dawn stood for a moment, watching the boys, making sure the youngest didn’t burn his tongue or tip the bowl. Then she returned to the kitchen, exhaled, and pulled the ledger back into the light.

Riley was still there. She hadn’t moved.

They stared at each other for a long time. The rain beat harder against the window, and for a second Riley thought the pane might shatter under the pressure.

“You’re doing enough,” Riley said, barely louder than the sound of the rain. “You’re not failing them. You’re the only reason they’re still together.”

Dawn swallowed hard, throat working. She nodded, but didn’t say anything, and instead bent back over the numbers, pencil trembling in her hand. The math didn’t change. But this time, Dawn seemed less **** to **** it into something it could never be. She just kept writing, kept moving, as if that alone was enough.

"You know," Riley said, her voice soft with something like prophecy, "I see you in a different light someday. In a beautiful hotel by the ocean, making people smile just by walking into a room. You'll wear this white dress that matches the clouds, and everyone will turn when you laugh."

Dawn's eyes widened slightly. "A hotel? I can barely afford community college."

"Life has surprises," Riley said. "Good ones, too. You'll meet people who see exactly what you're worth. A man who looks at you like you’re the sun breaking through clouds. Friends who become family. You’ll make people smile just by existing. And that light inside you—" she gestured to Dawn's chest, "—the one you're using to keep everyone else warm? It's going to shine so bright it'll guide people home."

Dawn looked up, and for the first time her gaze landed on Riley like a living thing. "Thanks," she said, her voice almost strong, a flicker of hope behind her exhaustion. "I'd like that."

Riley nodded. "Anytime. It's waiting for you."

Riley lingered for a few seconds, then pushed away from the table, her own knees shaking as she stood. The anger was still there, but now it was refracted through something else—admiration, maybe, or pity, or the sense that some burdens could never be put down, only redistributed. Riley had carried her own once, and it had nearly killed her, but she’d never had to do it for anyone else. That was the difference.

She looked back at Dawn, and wanted to tell her a thousand things: that her own son would have been lucky to have a sister like this; that it wasn’t too late to ask for help; that she deserved to be a child, even if only for a minute. But the words got stuck. She settled for a squeeze of Dawn’s thin shoulder, a promise delivered in the silence.

Dawn didn’t flinch from the touch. She closed her eyes, breathed deep, then squared her jaw and turned a page in the ledger.

Riley left the kitchen behind, her eyes wet but her spine unbowed.

Somewhere, in the future, she hoped Dawn would remember this—that she’d held it together when no one else could, that she’d been more than enough.

The apartment dissolved like watercolor in rain—walls losing their definition, the sound of Dawn's scribbling fading into nothing, until Riley stood alone in the humming dark of the Garden of Glass. Her chest was still tight from what she'd witnessed, her breath coming in shallow pulls, and she moved without thinking, drawn toward the nearest flashing mirror fragment as if by instinct rather than intention. She touched it with trembling fingers, and the glass was warm.

The Garden had shifted around her—the pillars rearranged into a spiral that made her feel less alone and more observed, the shards on the floor arranged into a deliberate path beneath her feet. The darkness was less suffocating now, almost companionable, and when she stepped forward the floor chimed softly, like bells in a distant room. The mirrors tilted slightly toward her as she passed, and she heard fragments of whispers cutting through the gentle hum: "I learned it for you" in a voice she almost recognized, "...you're enough..." echoing from somewhere within the fog, and beneath it all, something that sounded like "...promise."

The blue light refracting through the pillars caught her eye—a distant movement, someone else passing through their own threshold—and Riley realized she was crying. The condensation on the glass pillars caught her tears' reflection, and for the first time in the Garden, the mirrors didn't show her fragments. They showed her whole.

Myra knew she was dreaming the moment she stepped onto the slick stone floor, cold soaking through the thin soles of her flats, but that didn't make it easier. The Garden had a talent for blurring memory and reality until both were equally inescapable.

She couldn’t see, but she could feel the air, thick with rain and fear, the heavy scent of boiled cabbage layered over bleach, the rasp of her own breath as she **** herself forward.

Myra let the cane guide her through the entryway. Each tap and drag across the old stone tile became a map. To the left, a battered coat tree with at least six heavy jackets, sodden and pungent; to the right, an umbrella rack, tipped with one umbrella still dripping onto the mat. She ran her fingertips on the walls, clammy, paint bubbling at the corners, the whole house suffused with the cold that never left in Belgian winter.

She’d barely cleared the entry before she felt it: the heavy stutter of unease. There was a wrongness here, new but also ancient, as if the apartment itself had absorbed the memory of every argument, every missed birthday, every footstep tracked in mud.

Myra’s cane mapped the hallway, the wood flexing in her grip, and each gentle tap of its tip brought new data—an uneven board, a slip of rug, the curl of a discarded shoelace. She counted five pairs of boots by the door, all thick-soled, none smaller than a child’s. She ran her knuckles along the coat tree, mapping the familiar chaos of outerwear: a patch of synthetic fur (old and matted), the brushed metal of a bicycle helmet, the zippered nylon of something that had once been high-end but was now just utility. There was an umbrella that hadn’t been shaken out, and the chill in the air was deep enough to etch itself into her lungs.

To her left, the kitchen, defined by the sharp, lemony edge of bleach and the unlovely overlay of boiled vegetables. Beyond that, a corridor, wider than the one she’d grown up with, and past that, a hollow space where the light felt thin and unkind. The floors here had been scrubbed with such **** that the grain ran smooth, almost frictionless under her bare feet. Each step was a risk.

And then she heard it: the near-silence, the hush so complete it became a roar. No TV, no ticking clock, no hum of ancient appliances. Just the slow drip of something that, by all rights, shouldn’t be dripping. She tilted her head, fox ears swiveling, triangulating: from the far end of the corridor, through a partially open door, the sound of liquid thickening as it hit linoleum. The air there tasted of rust and old coins, and Myra’s breath came sharp with the sudden, crystalline knowledge of blood.

She inched forward, her cane angled to catch the lip of the threshold before she committed. Beyond the door, the air was colder—every degree of difference registering on the bare skin of her forearms. There was a body here, Myra thought. She couldn’t see, but the pressure of it was unmistakable: the heavy, saturated aura of a person who had been here a long time and was no longer a person at all.

She didn’t dare enter the room. Not yet. Instead, she braced her shoulder to the doorframe, listening to the slow decay of the present moment, letting the cold creep up her legs until she could barely feel her toes. The urge to run was overwhelming. But she waited.

That was when she heard the storm outside—the quick, slippery footsteps on the stoop, the scramble for the right key, the muffled curse as the door stuck against swollen wood. Myra backed away from the open door, heart slamming in her chest. She retreated two, three steps, flattening herself against the hallway wall just in time for the front door to bang open.

“Hallo?” A young woman’s voice. Flemish accent, still softened by girlhood, but with a raggedness that suggested years of practice at being braver than she felt. Liesa. “Ben je thuis?”

Myra felt the pulse of her own blood in her ears. She listened as the boots tracked wet up the entry, the thunk-thunk of a messenger bag hitting the floor, and the quick, reflexive rattle of keys in a pocket. The woman (girl, really) called out again, “Mama?” her voice flinty, casual, but with a hairline fracture that widened as she moved further in.

The sound of shoes was joined by the wet slap of rain-soaked jeans. Myra clung to the wall, cane pointed at the floor, unwilling to announce herself. It wouldn’t matter. The girl’s attention was on the house, on the silence inside it. There was something performative about the way she stomped her boots, banged the umbrella against the coat rack, all of it a bid for normalcy.

Then, as the girl passed the kitchen, she stopped. Myra could hear it: the sudden halt, the exhalation through clenched teeth, the dead hush that follows when a human body detects a change in atmosphere so subtle it can’t be named, only feared. For a moment, nothing. Then, a drawer opened, then closed—so quick Myra barely registered the metallic ring.

“Hallo?” the girl tried again, her voice now sharp with anxiety. “Mama?” There was no answer. Myra knew there wouldn’t be. The girl advanced, the steps slower now, each footfall a demand for some reassurance that would not come.

Myra pressed herself flat as the girl stalked the corridor, passing within a meter of her and not even noticing, so intent was she on the silence ahead. Then came the final doorway, the coldest air, and the instant before the world collapsed, Myra heard the girl’s breath catch.

“Mama?” It was a question this time, thin as sewing thread.

The scream that followed was not theatrical. It didn’t tear the walls down, didn’t echo through the house like a warning. It was smaller than that—a collapse, a sound more like a gasp than a howl. Myra heard the girl’s body hit the floor, the thud muffled by something soft (a rug, or maybe just the refusal of the world to let the moment be too loud). There was a wet scrabble as the girl scrambled forward, hands and knees. The scream tried to come again, but this time it caught in her throat, and the only sound was a guttural, animal sob that cut straight to the bone. “Mama, nee, nee, mama, alsjeblieft…”

Myra’s own lungs locked up. She wanted to move, to help, but her feet would not unstick from the floor. She listened as the girl’s breath chopped itself into shorter and shorter pieces, as the plastic solidity of her boots gave way to the damp slap of her palms against linoleum. There was a shuffle, a dragging noise, and then a sound Myra could not immediately place: the ragged, arrhythmic beat of something being shaken, not out of hope, but out of total, obliterating denial.

The girl cried “Nee, nee, Mama, nee, nee, alsjeblieft, Mama!” each repetition growing less word, more sob, the syllables so full of horror they snapped the air between them. Myra felt every fragment of it as if it were her own.

She knew, without seeing, what the girl was doing. She’d reached the body. She was trying to wake it, or maybe just pull it back into the world by sheer will. The sound of hands against skin, the sickening drag as she tried to flip her mother over, the sticky resistance of blood already cooling and drying. The girl’s cries grew hoarse, then silent, as if she’d worn her voice out in the space of a single minute.

Myra couldn’t watch, couldn’t leave, couldn’t do anything but let her own body shake. It was only when she heard the girl’s breath hitch and slow that she was able to move at all. She edged down the hallway, cane clicking in front of her, and when she reached the doorway, she stopped. The air inside the room was so dense she had to physically **** herself to breathe.

She could hear the girl cradling her mother’s head, the sobbing, could hear the wet, shivery tremor in every exhale. The older woman—Liesa’s mother, Myra knew—was gone. The only movement was the daughter, rocking back and forth, the soft rustle of denim against tile, the slow saturation of her own sleeves with blood.

Myra stood there, holding her own breath, and listened. It felt obscene to witness the moment, but more obscene to abandon it. She willed herself to step inside, to be more than a ghost.

She groped for the nearest solid thing—a bookshelf, a desk, whatever—and steadied herself. She bent at the knees, lowering herself until she was as close to the floor as she dared. Then, very quietly, she set her cane down and reached forward.

Her hand found the girl’s shoulder, trembling so hard it made the bones feel like birds in flight. The girl didn’t jerk away, didn’t scream again; she was past that now. She just sagged, the way bodies do when their last illusion of safety dissolves.

“Hey,” Myra said, her own voice a rough whisper, “I’m here.”

The girl shook, a convulsive, almost angry movement. For a second, Myra thought she might hit her, or bolt, or simply collapse in on herself. But instead, the girl just kept rocking. Myra tried again: “You’re not alone. I promise.”

She felt the girl’s body tense, then slacken. The tears came in hot waves, crashing through whatever had been holding them back before. “Mijn Mama!” She wailed, and Myra reached around, arms encircling her in a hug that was more about preventing her from coming apart entirely than offering any actual comfort.

The silence in the room thickened. Myra pressed her cheek to the girl’s hair and tried to keep her own grief from leaking out, but it was impossible. The smell of blood and cabbage and rain was all around them, but underneath it, Myra caught the faint, not-yet-gone trace of the mother’s perfume—violets, or maybe just the memory of flowers—and for a moment, the world spun.

They stayed like that a long time, the dead woman cooling beside them, the daughter refusing to let go even as her knuckles went white with the effort. When the tears finally abated, the girl spoke, her voice so thin Myra almost missed it. She didn’t know if Liesa spoke English, or if the Garden translated for her.

“She said she’d wait until I got home.”

Myra didn’t know what to say. She tightened her hold instead.

The girl buried her face in Myra’s shoulder, sobbing so quietly it barely disturbed the air. “She said—she said it would get better.” There was no sarcasm in it, just the bewilderment of someone betrayed by hope.

Myra nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She thought of the hundreds of bodies she’d seen in the hospital—some still warm, some already hardening—and how every one of them left behind a daughter or a son or someone who would never be able to fill the hole.

The girl clung to her. Time stretched, the cold pressing in from the windows, the hush so deep that even the rain outside had gone shy.

Finally, the girl let go. She reached for her mother’s hand, lacing her own fingers through the cooling ones, and held it as if she could transfer life by pressure alone. Myra let her do it, gave her the space, but stayed close enough that if the world started to tilt, she could anchor her.

After a while, the girl wiped her face on her sleeve, then drew her knees up and just sat, back against the wall, staring at the far corner. The silence was absolute.

Myra waited until she was sure the girl would not break, then placed a hand on her shoulder one last time. “You did everything you could,” she said. “You were a good daughter. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.”

The girl nodded, a small, sharp movement. “Dank u,” she said. “Thank you.”

Myra left her there, knowing it wasn’t enough, but it was all she had. She took her cane, walked the length of the corridor back to the front door, and let herself out into the rain.

The world outside was colder, wetter, more alive. But the memory of what had happened inside followed her, the ache in her chest as real as any injury she’d ever suffered. She stood under the eaves and let herself cry, quiet and slow, until the garden reality came apart at the seams and let her go.

The rain dissolved into something soundless—not fading but stopping, as if a door had closed between one breath and the next. Myra's cane, which had been tapping against wet stone, found instead a floor that thrummed beneath her feet like a held note, and the cold that had seeped into her bones gave way to air that was merely cool, almost gentle. She stood very still, her shoulders still curved inward from grief, as the Garden of Glass assembled itself around her: the pillars humming their three-note chord, rhythmic now, almost like a heartbeat. A fragment chimed ahead—her threshold—and beneath the whispers she could make out words: "don't disappear," someone sang softly, and underneath, a boy’s voice, wailing: "Where is she? I can’t find her anymore!" and then a girl weeping somewhere in the distance, so quiet it might have been her own heartbeat made audible.