Throughline: First Cracks, Part 2

Emi was not sure, in these dreams, which details belonged to her and which to the world. She floated to the surface of the next memory like a swimmer breaking water, lungs filling with the scent of brown sugar and lemon zest, the warm, yeasty promise of baking bread, and, under it all, the faintest sting of chlorine from the backyard pool. For a long, trancelike moment, the light of the kitchen—stained orange through old curtains, brighter where it spilled across the battered linoleum—felt more real than her own hands, and the clatter of a spoon in a Pyrex bowl nearly startled her.

She recognized the house before she saw the girl. She'd been here, of course, many times as a child. The kitchen was the sort where nothing ever truly changed: a crooked magnet collection snaked up the side of the avocado-green fridge, the counter was a jigsaw of laminate patches and knife scars, and the air carried a perpetual echo of last week’s coffee. At the far end, a window looked out onto a suburban yard, metal poles and a broken metal netting barely visible in the late-winter dusk.

Andy’s childhood home.

Laura stood at the kitchen island, twelve years old and caught between girl and ghost. Her hair, always wild in later years, was tamed for school but already breaking free, wisps tickling her cheek as she bent over a sheet of parchment paper. There were cookies everywhere—neat rows of fat golden disks, already cooled and ready for decoration, and, in front of Laura, a triangle of piping bags filled with different colors of chocolate. She worked with a surgeon’s focus, outlining each cookie with a ring of dark chocolate, then switching to white to inscribe… Emi peered closer. Limericks. Every cookie had a poem, but the handwriting was so cramped, the lines so tight, Emi had to hover just behind Laura to read them:

There once was a principal, true,
Whose toupee was a tragic shade blue.
It squeaked when he ran,
Frightened children and man,
But his hallway patrols always flew.

On another:

The lunch lady’s soups were a fear,
They jiggled and whispered, “Come near…”
But rumor was told,
They were made from old mold,
So we always just swapped them for beer.

A third, even more pointed:

Ms. Burch’s obsession with hats
Is rivaled by only her cats.
If you knock on her door,
You’ll hear eighty-four—
They’re her children, no ifs, ands, or thats.

Laura’s tongue poked out in concentration, and when the piping bag slipped, she swore under her breath, then quickly smudged the line with a damp finger, trying again. Her movements were precise but a little frantic, as though she was racing a clock only she could see. The counter was already dusted in flour, fingers sticky, but she didn’t pause to lick the sugar off them or take a break—she just kept at it, decorating cookies as if the world depended on it.

Emi drifted through the kitchen doorway, sunlight tracing each of her six arms in warm gold. Her breath hitched—standing here, in this memory, felt as natural as breathing, yet every heartbeat throbbed with longing. Laura didn’t turn or blink. Emi’s vision blurred; she brushed tears away with a gentle sweep of her lowest hand, willing the sight of Laura—so bright, so determined—to steady her.

Laura’s small mouth pressed into a line of resolve as she arranged rows of freshly iced cookies. Her voice rang out, flat and earnest, like a girl who didn’t yet know how to shield her heart. “I’m not sure this is going to work,” she said, glancing at the racks. “I want her to laugh, but she might think it’s a prank. Or that I’m being mean. Maybe I’ll just make things worse.” She lifted a cookie, hesitated, then set it down again.

Emi bore the ache of every one of those words. She knew this story by heart—but listening was the only way to anchor a dream, so she stayed silent, letting memory unfurl around her. Laura exhaled and looked up at last—her eyes bright with worry, flickering over Emi’s extra limbs without a pause. “You're back,” she said, voice light, “took your time, but... thank you for visiting me again.” It was a little joke, a throwaway, but to Emi it sounded like the sweetest acknowledgment. She wondered who this memory-Laura thought she was.

“These are for Chloe,” Laura said, meeting Emi’s gaze for a heartbeat. “Do you know her? She’s been gone two days—the nurse says ‘family issues,’ Ms. Fenton told me to back off. But if I leave these in her locker, she’ll know somebody’s thinking of her. Even if she never says so.” Her voice wavered, and she pressed both hands flat to the counter, grounding herself. Emi’s throat tightened—she wanted to tell Laura how much her kindness mattered, how much this little act of kindness had meant to Chloe, even after sixteen years, how much Andy still loved her, how much Emi herself missed her. She wanted to apologize for their last stupid fight, and the hurt she had caused. But she swallowed it down.

Instead, Emi reached out one upper hand and traced the swirl of chocolate limerick on a cookie. “They’re really funny,” she said softly. Laura let out a huff of relief, her shoulders easing. “They’re supposed to be,” she muttered, pride flickering through her worry. “But what if she hates them? Or thinks I’m mocking her? I didn’t sign my name—I thought anonymity would be cooler. I guess that’s kind of cowardly.”

The heater clicked on, rattling the window. The kitchen suddenly felt cavernous, echoes of quiet houses and too-small conversations pressing at Emi’s chest. She wanted to say, I remember you, I miss you, Andy still grieves you, you are still loved after so long, I wish I could warn you—all at once—but she knew she could only offer the simplest truth. “She’ll get it,” Emi said, voice trembling. “She’ll know it’s from someone who cares.” Laura shrugged, but Emi saw the tiny ripple of relief.

The girl worked in silence after that. Emi watched every tremor of Laura’s fingers as she lined cookies with surgical precision. She watched the tension melt out of Laura’s jaw, replaced by fierce pride as the kitchen filled with chocolate and sugar. Emi’s heart ached—she wanted to freeze this moment, to keep Laura safe in that beam of sunset, to shelter her from the world that would never be kind to a girl who dared to care so much, despite how much her own life had tried to break her.

At last, Laura stepped back and surveyed her battalion of cookies. She broke one in half and offered Emi the larger piece. “Here,” she said, bright and shy all at once. “Try it. I want to know if it’s good.” Emi held the warm cookie, the sugar melting on her tongue like a promise. “It’s perfect,” she managed. And it was.

Laura swept her hand over her jeans, gathering stray crumbs, then began packing the cookies into a battered tin with reverence. Emi watched the ritual, the deliberate faith in small gestures. When Laura pressed the lid on, she hesitated, then said, “You can take one, if you want. Or leave it for someone else. I don’t mind.” Emi’s chest compressed with gratitude and sorrow. She picked up another cookie. “Thank you,” she whispered, tears shimmering at the edges of her vision.

“No, thank you,” Laura replied, her crooked smile unwavering—unaware of Emi’s heartbreak, unaware of how desperately Emi longed to say more. But the words caught in her throat. The memory softened around them, the air turning syrupy and gold. Emi felt the sweetness still lingering, and for the first time in a long time, she let herself believe that one small act of kindness could outlast even the deepest pain.

The kitchen dissolved around Emi like watercolor in rain, the golden light bleeding into grey, the walls softening into nothing. The cookies in Laura's hands became transparent, then scattered like ash, and the girl herself—still young, still kind, still alive in the grammar of memory—faded backward into a darkness that swallowed her without mercy. Emi reached out, but her hands passed through dissolving air, and she was falling, or being drawn, through layers of nothing.

She surfaced in the Garden of Glass gasping, as if breaking through water. The mirrors caught her reflection in fragments—a hand here, an eye there, never whole—and the pillars' hum vibrated through her bones like a scream held just below the threshold of sound. In the chaos of whispers, one voice cut through: Laura's voice, small and uncertain, repeating, "I'm not sure this is going to work."

The words looped and echoed, and Emi let her tears fall. She wished she could have been braver, she could have told Laura all she needed to tell her. “No, thank you.” Laura’s voice echoed among the whispers. Emi hoped she had given that dream-Laura a smidgen more confidence, a bit more happiness, if only for a little while. And she grieved for the inevitable end.

A mirror shard flashed ahead, bright enough to cut, and Emi moved toward it with the numb obedience of someone still half-drowning, her six arms trailing behind her like the limbs of something broken, reaching for a kitchen that no longer existed.

The hush of the library was a texture, not a sound—thick, gentle, blanketing everything in the softest version of silence. Sam eased through the side door, careful not to let it bang, and was met with a blast of artificial cool that raised goosebumps along her forearms. The air in here always felt a decade out of time: not the charged, up-late-at-the-lab buzz of the engineering halls, but the old-fashioned, near-sacred restraint of a place built for reading and nothing else. Afternoon light came through the high windows in dust-heavy beams, painting stripes on the tables, but the fluorescence overhead was merciless, flattening out the world.

There were students everywhere—some alone, hunched over screens with cords trailing from their ears like umbilicals, some in pairs, some gathered around battered wooden tables with open laptops and paper coffee cups. The old library had been designed for silence, but twenty years of laptops and whispered phone calls had turned it into a hum of constant, low-key pressure. Sam could hear the click of a hundred keystrokes, the faintest rustle of book pages, the far-off cough of a librarian doing the rounds. She scanned the stacks, looking for anything out of place.

There. In the corner where the double-height windows met the wall, she spotted Erin: twenty-one, hair pulled back so hard it stretched her face into severity, back curled tight over a fortress of environmental science textbooks. The posture was pure defense—shoulders up, arms wrapped around the work, chin almost pressed to the page. If there was a master class in making yourself unapproachable, Erin could have taught it.

Sam hesitated, then moved closer, threading her way through the tables. From this angle, she could see the whiteness of Erin’s knuckles where her hand gripped the pen. Every part of her looked tense, like if you touched her she might shatter. The muscles of her jaw were clenched so tight the skin had gone shiny. She was surrounded by notecards, their edges perfectly aligned, but her gaze wasn’t moving across them. Instead, she stared fixedly at one line in the textbook, as if she could will the meaning out of it through sheer ****.

Around her, students floated in their own orbits—groups of three or four at the next table, one kid splayed on the floor with a highlighter clenched in his teeth, two girls whispering behind a laptop, faces close enough to be mistaken for lovers. But none of them glanced at Erin, and Erin glanced at none of them. There was an invisible bubble around her, and Sam recognized it instantly: the **** field of a girl who refused to ask for help, who would rather drown in the material than admit to the world that she was in over her head.

Sam watched, not wanting to break the spell. She remembered this version of Erin, from every group project or study hall or any setting where being seen as less than perfect was unacceptable. She felt a pressure in her chest, the ache of old empathy, and almost laughed to realize how little had changed, even after all this time.

Erin’s eyes flicked to the clock on her phone, then back to the page. She shifted in her seat, restless, like she wanted to bolt but was glued down by duty. Sam wondered how long she’d been here—two hours, three? Had she even eaten lunch? On the far side of the table, a Tupperware container sat unopened, beads of condensation inside mapping the slow **** of a long-forgotten sandwich.

The clock on the wall inched forward. Students came and went. A boy in a faded UIC sweatshirt dropped his backpack at a table nearby and started unpacking a small mountain of math. He was the only other person who seemed even remotely close to Erin’s gravity—he sat at the next table over, but angled himself just enough to be in her peripheral vision, the classic move of someone working up the courage to say something but not quite there yet. Sam recognized him, of course. She grinned as he peeked at Erin, looked away, peeked again. She recognized the nervous energy, and what was going to happen. Erin, for her part, did not look up, not even once.

Finally, the boy stood. He hesitated, then took a slow walk around the table, pretending to browse the book spines on the wall. He stopped directly behind Erin, cleared his throat, then, voice pitched low and careful, said: “Excuse me. Is this seat taken?”

Erin barely moved. She didn’t look up, just flicked her gaze at the empty chair across from her, then back to her notes. “No,” she said, not unkind but not exactly friendly either. The boy sat, quietly, and began unpacking his own arsenal of study gear: a spiral notebook, a battered scientific calculator, two mechanical pencils with the erasers already gone. He placed them with almost military precision, mirroring Erin’s own setup.

For a long minute, neither spoke. Sam could feel the tension ramp up, as if the air had gone electrically charged. Erin continued to ignore the boy, but her pen now hovered a few centimeters above the page, making tiny, anxious circles. The boy tapped at his notebook, erased something, then after an eternity, leaned forward.

“Hey. Sorry,” he whispered, “but are you in Campbell’s class? Environmental Systems?”

Erin’s eyes finally flicked upward. She nodded once, then dropped her gaze again.

“I, uh, thought so. You’re in the Monday section, right?”

Another nod.

The boy bit his lip, thinking. “I’m totally lost on the hydrology unit. If you want, we could, like, go over it together? I mean, if you’re stuck too. Or if you get it, you could maybe…” He trailed off, face reddening.

Erin looked up, this time really seeing him. Her eyes—brighter and sharper than Sam remembered—narrowed slightly, as if searching for the angle, the joke, the moment he would reveal this was just a prelude to something cruel or dumb. But there was nothing in his face except earnestness, the clumsy hope of someone who wanted to connect and didn’t know how.

“I’m not a tutor,” Erin said. Her voice was flat, but not entirely unfriendly. More a warning shot than a rejection.

The boy smiled, relieved. “Me neither. But maybe we could be less confused together?”

Sam suppressed a laugh. It was the worst pickup line she’d ever heard, but it landed in the only way that mattered: Erin, after a pause, slid her notes across the table, showing him the formula she’d been wrestling with.

“I don’t get how the groundwater equation actually predicts flow rates,” she admitted, voice almost inaudible. The confession seemed to cost her.

The boy leaned in, studying the notes. “I think it’s, like, a boundary condition thing? If you know the inputs, the model gives you the outflow. But the units are weird. Here—” He flipped to his own notes, pointed at a diagram, then started talking through the math.

Erin watched, skeptical at first, but as the boy walked through his explanation, Sam saw a subtle softening—a slow unclenching of the jaw, a relaxing of the shoulders. Erin picked up her pen and began making notes, occasionally asking a question, always precise, always to the point. The conversation went back and forth, tentative at first but gaining momentum. Within minutes, they had built a small, private universe of problem sets and equations and marginalia, separate from the rest of the room.

Sam found herself drawn to the table, standing only a few feet away, pretending to read the spines of books while she watched. It was like witnessing a chemical reaction: two inert substances, given just enough activation energy, beginning to interact. There was nothing romantic about it—at least not yet. But there was a charge, a sense that both of them had been waiting for this exact moment without knowing it.

As the boy explained, his hands moved in wide, looping gestures—he drew diagrams in the air, made little illustrations in the margins of Erin’s notebook, all of it eager but never condescending. Erin, for her part, was fiercely focused, never giving more than a single-word answer unless she was sure it was correct, but gradually, almost imperceptibly, her answers grew longer, her questions more engaged. She was still bristling, still wary, but the boy’s patience seemed to wear her down. Or maybe, Sam thought, it was wearing down the armor she’d built around herself.

Sam watched, feeling the weight of it: the effort it took for Erin to let someone else help, the fear that asking for anything would be seen as weakness, the near-heroic will required to simply sit with another person and not be ashamed of what you needed. Sam knew this feeling intimately. She remembered every group project where she’d taken over, not because she wanted to but because letting someone else be in charge had always felt like a **** sentence. She remembered the sting of teachers’ comments—“Samantha could learn to work in teams,” “Samantha needs to let others contribute,” “Samantha is too independent”—each meant as gentle correction, but all received as condemnation.

She wondered, for a moment, what it would have been like to be Erin. To have the same pride, but with a different flavor: not the pride of someone who believes they’re better, but the pride of someone who’s afraid if they ever ask for help, the answer will be no. She watched as Erin allowed herself to be confused, to be human, and felt something in her own chest twist with empathy.

They worked together for almost an hour. The boy, whose name turned out to be Andy, never once made a joke at Erin’s expense, never once assumed she was dumb, never tried to steer the conversation to anything but the material. He did all the things you were supposed to do when you wanted to be friends with someone who did not trust easily. He listened, he offered, he never pressed. Sam found herself smiling at Andy’s dorky competence, the way he was so bad at social graces that it almost looped around to being endearing.

At one point, Andy got up to use the bathroom, and Erin, left alone, let her head drop onto her arms. For a moment, she just breathed, face buried in the crook of her elbow, all tension drained away. When she looked up again, Sam saw the exhaustion in her eyes—the raw, brittle fatigue of someone who had been holding up the world for so long, she’d forgotten it was okay to put it down for a second.

Sam couldn’t help herself. She stepped closer, pretending to browse the nearby shelf, but watching as Erin stared out the window, blinking in the gold of the late afternoon sun. In the light, Erin looked younger, softer, less armored. Sam wished she could go over and just—say something, anything, to make it easier.

Instead, she whispered: “You’re allowed to ask for help, you know. It doesn’t make you weak.”

She didn’t expect Erin to hear her. But Erin’s eyes flicked in her direction, then away, and for a heartbeat Sam thought she saw the corners of her mouth lift, just the tiniest bit.

Andy came back, and they went back to work. By the time the sky outside had shifted from gold to gray, they had built a small empire of highlighted notes, diagrams, and scribbled reminders. Sam watched as Erin, uncharacteristically, offered Andy a granola bar from her backpack, and he, surprised, took it with a shy smile. They exchanged a few more words—something about a quiz next week, a joke about the professor’s weird tie, a tentative plan to meet again—and then Andy packed up and left, backpack slung over one shoulder.

Erin watched him go, then sat back in her chair. She closed her eyes, hands folded in her lap, and exhaled.

Sam moved to the edge of the table and sat down, not caring if she was seen now. She looked at Erin, really looked at her, and felt a fierce kind of love—not romantic, not even sisterly, but the love you feel for someone who is doing their best to survive in a world that’s always trying to grind them down.

“He was never in that class,” Sam murmured, remembering Andy's story, “He borrowed the textbook and memorized a few pages so he could have a reason to approach you. He first saw you in the greenhouse, and that was it. You never had to earn it,” Sam said. “You never had to be perfect. He was always going to be kind to you, even if you failed.”

Erin didn’t move. Maybe she couldn’t hear. But Sam let the words hang anyway, like a blessing, or a benediction, or maybe just the truth.

She waited a while longer, watching as the library emptied out, as the light faded and the hush deepened. Erin eventually packed up, the Tupperware container unopened, and left, moving through the tables with her head up and her stride a little looser than before.

Sam stayed behind, staring at the abandoned granola bar wrapper on the table, feeling the slow, warm tide of tears prick at her eyes.

She let herself cry, just a little, for all the times she had tried to be Erin, and all the times she had failed.

Then she stood, wiped her face with the sleeve of her borrowed jacket, and walked out into the blue-lit dusk, into the Garden of Glass.

The library dissolved. Erin's figure blurred first, her edges softening into the darkness—not violently, but gently, the way a photograph fades when left too long in sunlight. The shelves followed, their spines unseaming themselves into shadow. The golden light that had warmed the space guttered and died, and Sam found herself standing alone in a space that was no longer quite solid.

The mirrors rose around her like a question she couldn't answer.

It took Sam a moment to understand what she was seeing—the fractured glass, the infinite darkness, the pillars humming their bone-deep song. Her eyes, still wet with tears, reflected back at her a thousand times over in the jagged shards: Sam crying, Sam looking away, Sam looking back. The reflections were just slightly out of sync, as if the glass were remembering her a half-second after she moved, catching grief in slow motion.

The darkness here was gentler than it had been before—not warm, but less suffocating, as if the space itself had absorbed some of what the girls had endured and was learning, incrementally, to hold them more lightly. The whispers were still chaotic, still violent, but Sam found her ear catching rhythm now: patterns within the noise, almost like music struggling to be born.

A shard of mirror flashed nearby, catching light that shouldn't exist, producing a single clear note—high and bright and almost welcoming. A voice on the wind whispered, “Do I know you?”

Sam wiped her face with trembling hands, took a breath that felt like drowning in reverse, and moved toward it. Her reflection in the mirrors showed a girl who had just learned something true about herself: that she had always been trying to be strong so she wouldn't have to ask for help, and that maybe—maybe—there was a difference between strength and isolation that no one had ever bothered to teach her.

The next room waited on the other side of the glass, invisible but felt.

The world that waited for Erin was not a forest or a beach or even a garden, but a hallway: pale, infinite, airless. She blinked and the mirrors were gone, replaced by acoustic tile and the weird static hum of a suburban elementary school in winter. The light was that particular flavor of institutional gray that turned even the brightest things flat and old. No windows. No real sound except the smothered shriek of sneakers, far off, and the low, predatory buzz of fluorescent tubes hanging low over the corridor.

She was clothed, but somehow that was worse. Arabella had draped her in gauzy pink silk that clung to her mint-green skin and did nothing to hide her absurd J-cups. The harem pants cinched at her ankles, the veil across her face—she looked like a Halloween costume of Jasmine from Aladdin, if Jasmine had been designed by someone who'd never met a woman. The fabric felt foreign against her skin, an unwelcome reminder of how quickly she'd grown accustomed to nakedness. Erin tugged at the crop top, arms crossed self-consciously over her exposed midriff, and shuffled down the hallway in battered trail runners that clashed absurdly with the outfit, until she heard the voices.

There was a bench outside the principal's office—old wood, lacquer cracked and splintering, the kind of thing nobody sat on unless they were in trouble or had nowhere else to go. A little girl with hair cropped to her jaw in a bright copper helmet sat on it, ears sticking out like exclamation points, knees pressed together and hands clutching a cardboard folder so tight the corners had started to fray. Her legs did not touch the floor. The shoes dangled, scuffed and sad, like the rest of her.

Across the corridor, three girls loitered by the water fountain, arms folded. They whispered to each other, heads bent in a way that didn't require actual sound. Erin caught fragments: "But where is she really from?" and "She doesn't look like her mom at all." The tallest one giggled, "My mom says Riley's probably from China or something." Another one with a glittery barrette replied, "No way, she doesn't have Chinese eyes. Maybe she's an alien!" The third girl, twirling her shoelace, said, "My brother says adopted kids are just leftovers nobody wanted." One of them glanced at the bench, and Erin felt a jolt of recognition. Riley. That small face went rigid, the kind of stillness that came just before crying or ****. She didn't look at the girls. She just stared straight ahead, eyes fixed on the floor, waiting for something that would not arrive.

Next to her on the bench, a woman—Riley’s mother, Erin supposed—fussed with her purse, checked her phone, pretended to watch the clock. She looked tired. Her skirt was too tight across her knees and her shoes were the kind that pinched after an hour, and she kept glancing at the closed principal’s door with the expression of someone bracing for dental work. But every minute or two she reached over, stroked Riley’s hair, or patted her on the shoulder with the kind of effortful affection that meant she was doing her best.

“Sweetie, don’t listen to them,” the woman said at last, her voice low but clipped. “They’re just… mean girls. You know that, right?” Riley didn’t answer. Her fingers were white around the folder.

The mother tried again, softer. “I told you before, you don’t have to answer their questions. You don’t owe them anything. Okay?”

Riley’s voice, when it came, was tinny and flat: “Am I adopted?”

The woman’s smile froze, teeth tight. She turned on the bench to face her daughter. “Why would you say that?” she asked, too bright, too fast.

“They said I don’t look like you. Or like Dad,” Riley muttered. “They said my real parents are probably criminals or dead or—” She stopped. The words hung in the air, humming like power lines.

The mother looked at Riley for a long moment. Then, as if deciding something, she put her arm around Riley’s shoulders and pulled her in. “You are my daughter,” she said, enunciating every syllable. “Do you hear me? Ours. Mine. That’s all that matters.” Riley did not lean into her. She did not lean away. She sat, suspended, waiting for permission to breathe.

The woman made a sound in her throat. “Look, sweetie, I have to talk to the principal for just a minute, okay? Can you be brave? Just wait here, and I’ll be right back. Don’t talk to those girls.” She stood, smoothed her skirt, and shot the girls at the water fountain a look of such cold venom they scattered without a word. Erin almost laughed, then caught herself.

When the woman disappeared into the office, Riley wilted. The tension ran out of her like water down a drain. Her head dropped, and she pressed her forehead to the battered folder, rocking ever so slightly on the bench. There was no anger, no defiance. Just that heavy, old silence of children who already knew nobody was coming to fix anything.

Erin stood in the middle of the hallway, arms folded so tight her fingers bit into her own skin. She wanted to move. She wanted to turn around and run, or find some way to help, or at least scream at the universe for letting this happen. Instead, she **** herself to walk the last ten steps and sit down beside Riley. Her thigh nearly brushed the child’s, but she left a hand’s width of space. For the first time, Riley looked up.

There was no shock at the sight of Erin, a mint-green adult woman with enormous breasts, wearing a pink harem outfit. There was only the bored, incurious gaze of a child who had already seen every flavor of freak, and didn’t much care for any of them.

“Hi,” said Riley, voice smaller than it had been.

“Hi,” Erin said back.

“You’re green,” Riley said, suspiciously.

Erin nodded. “Yeah, I am.”

The silence returned. It would have lasted forever, but Riley’s hands started worrying the folder again, and she blurted: “You’re not a teacher.”

“No,” Erin agreed. “Not even close.”

Another silence, this one less painful, as if Riley was recalibrating her expectations. Then: “Are you in trouble, too?”

Erin almost laughed, but didn’t. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I am.”

Riley nodded, as if this made perfect sense. She slouched into the bench, letting the folder rest on her lap. Her eyes stayed on the floor. Erin risked another inch of closeness, then another, until their shoulders nearly touched.

“It’s okay to be angry,” Erin said, keeping her voice very low. “Or sad. Or both.”

“I’m not sad,” said Riley, the lie so bald and plain it didn’t even need correcting.

Erin took a breath. “When my parents split, I used to sit in the hallways at school and pretend I was made of stone. That if I held still long enough, nothing could get inside.” She didn’t know why she was telling Riley this. Maybe because it was the only honest thing she’d ever learned about pain.

Riley looked at her, eyes shiny but furious. “Did it work?”

“No,” Erin said. “Not really. But after a while, it hurt less. Or I got used to the hurting. Or both.”

Riley nodded, her jaw set. “I don’t care what they say. It doesn’t matter if I’m adopted. I just don’t want my mom to be sad.”

The folder in her lap trembled with the effort of holding all the feeling in. Erin reached out, very slowly, and put her hand over Riley’s. Not squeezing, just covering. For a long time, neither of them moved. Then Riley’s grip on the folder relaxed, and she let herself lean a little closer, just enough to notice.

“Maybe you could tell her that,” Erin suggested, voice gone hoarse. “That you don’t care. Or that you do. Or that you’re angry, or that you wish people would just leave you alone.”

Riley shrugged. “She wouldn’t like that.”

“Maybe not,” said Erin. “But she might understand it. Sometimes moms are sad, too.”

That last sentence hit Erin in the gut. She tried not to let it show, but she could feel the tears gathering at the edges of her own vision. She blinked hard, cleared her throat. The hallway was empty now, just the two of them and the steady, low hum of fluorescent light.

Riley’s mother emerged from the office, voice low as she thanked the principal. When she turned and saw Riley on the bench, leaning against Erin, her face did something strange and complicated: a flicker of relief, then worry, then a small, hopeful smile.

“Time to go, sweetie,” she said, and Riley stood, folder tucked to her chest. She looked back at Erin, a glance as fast as a blink, and then she was gone.

The institutional gray of the hallway began to dissolve at the edges first—the acoustic tiles losing their texture, the fluorescent hum dropping into a lower register, as if the sound itself were sinking. Erin stood slowly, Riley's absence still warm against her side, and watched as the corridor stretched and thinned, pulling away from her like a held breath finally released. The walls didn't collapse so much as unmake themselves, fading into a fog that was almost blue, almost alive. The scuffed linoleum gave way beneath her feet to something thinner, more fragile—and then she was standing in the Garden of Glass.

The shock of it nearly undid her. The fractured mirrors loomed out of the darkness like a question she didn't know how to answer, and Erin found herself reaching out instinctively, as if to steady herself on one of the thin glass pillars. Her hand hovered just short of touching, trembling. The humming they emitted felt like it was coming from inside her own chest—or perhaps she was simply recognizing it now, the vibration that matched the ache she'd been carrying since the hallway dissolved. Around her ankles, the bluish fog curled and reached, and Erin didn't pull away. She stood very still, letting the tears that had gathered in the school corridor finally spill over, watching them fall into the darkness like stones into water that wasn't there.

One of the larger mirror shards caught what little light existed and flashed—a threshold, waiting.