And Deeper Still

Marie took one step forward, then another, and stopped just short of Laura, her hands knotted together behind her back as if she’d had to tether them there. Her eyes were filled with .. what? Anger? Dread? Grief? Andy couldn't figure it out. She was watching Laura—both of her—with a levelness so pure it felt, to Andy, like a physical pressure. He realized he was holding his breath, waiting for the shatter.

Marie’s voice, when it came, felt like a challenge, like she both wanted Laura to fail, and dreaded it at the same time. “Where’d you grow up?”

Laura blinked, both faces. She didn't know what to expect, but this wasn't it. Her hands folded at her stomachs, fingers lacing and unlacing in perfect sync. “Warrenville, Illinois. East side of town, near the Willow Run preserve.” Both of her kept her eyes on Marie.

A seam split in Marie’s mask; her mouth went a little slack, eyes sharpening, the calculation suddenly not hypothetical. Her voice trembled slightly. “What year were you born?”

“1995,” Laura said, and the word left a small echo in the garden.

Marie’s jaw clicked shut, then she turned, not to Laura this time, but directly to Andy, and the look she gave him was not even a little polite. “What the fuck is this?” she asked, and her voice had more heat than anything he’d seen in her before.

Andy blinked, startled. “It’s not a trick—”

“No,” Marie said, quick and hard. “That’s not possible. She died! I know the story. She drowned, Andy. I was there. The whole town grieved her, and her mother went out of her mind. You can’t—” She cut off, glancing at Laura again, then looked back at Andy with raw disbelief. “This is some kind of game. This cannot be the same Laura Ashford. And doubled, too?”

There was something almost **** in her voice, and Andy felt the cold blade of it cut through his own certainty. Laura didn’t move, but both bodies looked to him for support, for confirmation. The garden itself seemed to hush, as if waiting to see which way he would lean.

Andy shook his head, not as a denial but as a way to clear the static. “It is her,” he said, quietly but not weakly. “I know it’s insane. The doubling is a transformation. But we brought her back, I swear. Me and the others. Two weeks ago. I—” he stopped, words catching in his throat. “I went over. I found her.”

Marie’s eyes widened, just a flick, but she didn’t look away. He could hear the agitation in her voice, the confusion, the fear. “No. No, you can’t just say that. She’s been dead for sixteen years, Andy. She drowned, they found her body near the shack. I was there, Andy, I fucking saw it! You can’t just decide she’s alive because—” She gestured, unable to find the right word, then zeroed in on Laura’s face again. “What was your mother’s name?”

Laura looked at Andy, then at Marie, confused. Both voices were even. “My father called her Precious.”

Marie inhaled through her teeth, the sound sharp as a file. “That’s not a name a mother gives herself,” she said, and there was pain, sharp as a knife, there. “That’s a name someone gives you. That’s a name you’re turned into.”

Andy felt the ground slipping. The shape of something enormous was tearing its head in his mind. “Laura,” he said, his voice tight, “do you remember any other names?”

She frowned, thinking, then shook both heads. “No. Just that. She never told me more.”

Marie closed her eyes, and Andy watched as she ran a quick inventory of her own face, trying to keep something from leaking out. When she opened her eyes, they were glassy. “The scar,” she said, almost a whisper, like she had found something true, a discrepancy to cling to. “Laura had a scar. On her jaw, right here.” Marie pointed at her own face, the spot exact. “Her father… she got it when she was eleven.” She glared at Laura. “You don’t have that.”

Laura touched her jawline, both faces at once, then looked at Andy in confusion. “It’s gone,” she said. “Andy removed it last night, with one of his Gifts.”

Marie gave Andy a look of such unfiltered pain that he felt it in his chest. “Why would you do that?”

Andy stammered, “She asked me to—she didn’t want it anymore. It wasn’t a good memory.”

Laura, still touching her face, nodded. “It was from my father. He did it when I was eleven. I thought it was a curse, at first. A reminder that I wasn’t allowed to want anything good. I kept it so I would never forget that I wasn’t able to… to help. That maybe I was doomed to become him.” She swallowed, hard. “But I don’t want any part of him left. Not now. I’m not my father.”

Marie’s gaze didn’t so much soften as blur at the edges, as if something behind her eyes had started to melt and she was trying to freeze it back into place by sheer **** of will. She looked from Laura—both faces, both sets of blue eyes, both identical—and then, for the first time, at Andy.

“How do you know about the scar?” Andy asked, voice small but not weak.

Marie’s hands, still locked behind her, balled to fists. For a moment, she didn’t answer, and Andy thought she might bolt, or break something, or simply dissolve into pieces right there in the sunlit glade.

She said, tightly “Her mother told me. Once. A long time ago.” The voice was flat, but the words, once started, seemed to need to keep going. “She was so scared for her. She said, ‘That’s the only mark I’ll never be able to cover for her. I wish it had been me instead.’ She cried about it.” The voice caught, then **** itself steady again.

Laura’s hands, still touching her jaw, fell away, and for a heartbeat both bodies just looked at Marie, faces blank with the effort of processing. Then, together, they sat down on the bench across from Marie, as if gravity had decided enough was enough.

Marie followed, her legs barely making the effort. She slumped onto the stone, not next to Laura but just offset, like she was afraid to get too close to the impossible. She looked at her hands, then at Laura’s hands, then at Andy again, and finally back at Laura. “It can't be you. You’re not supposed to be here,” she said. “You can’t be here. Not after all this time.”

Andy felt something stir in his chest—not fear, not exactly, but the start of an avalanche, the way you feel when you know something is about to come apart for good and you’re not sure if you’re ready to ride it out. “She is here,” Andy said, knowing he was pushing the avalanche. “I crossed over, I found her. I brought her back. I know how it sounds, but—”

Marie’s laugh was soft, almost fond. “You don’t get it. None of you do. If she's back, then...” Then she looked up at Dinah, who had hovered to the edge of the clearing, watching with the faint, wincing concern of a woman who has seen a hundred impossible scenes but still gets a fresh paper cut every time one plays out in front of her. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” Marie said.

Dinah nodded, once. “I do.”

Marie turned then, scanning the garden, and Andy saw her eyes lock on the spot where Arabella stood. The Host was still, hands clasped in front of her, her face set in an expression that Andy recognized only from funerals and certain hard days in the hospital: the look of a woman who wishes she could make something easier, but knows the best she can do is witness it properly.

“Is this a joke, Arabella?” Marie called, her voice raw. “Are you doing this to me on purpose? I thought this was a place of healing, not cruelty! Is it supposed to make me feel better, or worse?!”

Arabella took a slow step forward, then another, closing the space with the kind of measured gravity Andy had come to associate with big reveals and worse news. Her dress was a deep violet today, her hair ran over her left shoulder and shimmered in the garden’s gold-tinted light.

She stopped just short of the bench, her hands still folded, and when she spoke, it was not with her usual showy warmth, but with a voice that was almost small. “I am not trying to hurt you, Marie,” she said. “I did not expect her to come here with Andy, but it is right. I know it is difficult to hold. Some things ask more of us than we have ready.” Her eyes, for a moment, found Andy’s, and he saw in them a flicker of the same lostness that he felt. “He really did bring her back, Marie,” Arabella said, gently. “He crossed the veil. He risked his life, he went further than anyone has, and brought her home.” She glanced at Laura, then back at Marie. “She’s real, Marie. She’s really Laura. Sarah’s daughter.”

The words hit like a dropped piano. For a long, slow moment, nobody moved.

The words had barely settled when Andy felt his mind begin to sprint, a tumble of old conversations and memory fragments spinning into place with brutal efficiency. It was as if someone had kicked over a box of puzzle pieces, and now every piece was flipping face up, edges locking in tight. Sarah’s daughter. The child Sarah wrote about in the first letter, the one she was carrying, the one she feared wouldn’t know her real mother. The child in the second letter, nearly born, the one Sarah begged Arabella to protect—because the Master wouldn’t.

My baby girl. I'm sorry, sweet girl. Sarah's words came back to Andy from the Garden of Glass.

He took a half-step backward, not because he meant to but because the ground under him had shifted. The garden’s air felt thinner now, like it was running out of oxygen to feed the moment.

With new, electric clarity, Andy recalled a conversation with Arabella, weeks earlier, during the third round. He had found out that Emily had been dating his cousin Jake, who had become the Master of her previous season. He remembered asking if Harem Hotel had a tendency to draw contestants from the same families, and it wasn’t always random. Him and Jake, Katherine and Eden, Laura Black and her two sisters, their connection to Shar. The thought had unsettled him, but never enough to push.

Andy remembered Laura, the night before, telling him that Arabella let slip she’d been “watching” Laura since she was a girl. Andy had thought, then, that it was the kind of hyperbole the Host enjoyed, a bit of panopticon theater, a byproduct of Arabella studying his life. But now it was literal: Arabella had been keeping a promise to Sarah, keeping an eye on the daughter she’d been asked to save.

He remembered Arabella's words, after the Fourth Challenge: She wasn't supposed to die, Andy, not there, not then.

He realized, with a lurch, that he should have seen this coming.

He thought of Laura’s mother, the woman she only ever had known as Precious. Sarah, a Contestant on the show. The Sarah from the letters. Curled up and rocking endlessly, weeping for her lost child.

And her father? Not just a mean, small man. Greg. The Greg from Arabella’s stories, the previous Master, the man who broke the system so thoroughly that it made Arabella want to change the rules. Laura had grown up inside the crater of the last big cataclysm and called it a family. Every single thing about her life was a knock-on from this place.

Sometimes a flower grows from poisoned soil. Sometimes that flower is the most beautiful one in the garden, precisely because it shouldn't exist at all. And Laura was caught between worlds from her first breath—born of rules broken and promises unkept.

He tried to find the words to say it, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He looked at Marie, and at Laura’s full name—Laura Marie Ashford, the middle name he’d always known but never thought about. Marie. The only thing Sarah could leave her daughter, a secret name, a signal flare buried in paperwork. A daughter, named after a sister.

He looked back at Marie, at her sharp jaw and the lines around her mouth, and knew: this woman was Laura’s aunt. The ground went missing entirely.

He glanced at Arabella, wild-eyed, and saw that she was watching him, her face carefully composed but her hands shaking a little at the fingertips. He remembered that second day, after Laura's resurrection. Welcome home, Arabella had said, We've been waiting a long time for you. He remembered. There are debts to be paid and wrongs to be righted, both for you and for this place.

And then: This world—The HH—is built on stories. Some stories are meant to end. Others are too powerful to let go. You, Laura, are one of those stories. You haunt this place—even in **** you shaped it. Andy could not let you go, and neither could we.

It had all been there, plain as day.

Laura's parents had moved to Warrenville when Laura was an infant, less than a month old. They had never spoken of where they had come from, or where she had been born.

Because Laura had been born here, inside The HH.

“Sarah’s daughter,” Andy rasped, voice thick. He wasn’t sure if he said it aloud, or if it was just the last thing he’d heard, but the reality of it dropped him into his body like a sack.

Laura felt his distress before he saw it; the bond pulsed with it, a sudden spike of cold and need. Both bodies went pale, her hands reaching for him in a way that was instinctive, almost animal.

She couldn’t follow where he’d just gone, but she knew Andy was in freefall. And then she saw Marie—saw the tears streaming freely down her face—and Andy watched both of Laura’s faces struggle to compute the reality of what was happening.

Marie broke first. She crossed the distance in two quick strides, arms open but not for herself—for Laura. She wrapped both of Laura’s bodies into a single, awkward hug and clung as if afraid someone would try to take Laura away again. The sound she made was not a sob, not at first. It was a long, low sound like a building coming down in slow motion, the air being sucked out before the crash. Then she began to weep, in the way people do when they have to pull a lost child from the rubble, the kind of weeping that reorders the air for ten yards in every direction.

Laura didn’t know what to do, but she let herself be hugged, both bodies folding around this stranger who had become not a stranger at all. Her faces were blank, terrified, and Andy saw her look at him over Marie’s shoulder with the naked panic of someone who’s been told she’s been living a borrowed life.

“My mother’s name wasn’t Sarah,” she said, one voice above a whisper, the other just barely louder. “Her name was Precious.” Her eyes found Andy, imploring.

Andy’s mind churned, still struggling to integrate the new facts into any kind of manageable order. “Laura,” he croaked. He looked to Arabella, to Marie, and back to Laura, then said, voice uneven, “I think this is your aunt.” He took a deep breath. “I think... I think Sarah was your mother’s real name, and she couldn’t tell you because she—” He stopped, the rest of the thought catching on the barbs of the past. “Because she wasn’t allowed.”

Laura took this in like a punch to the chest. For a moment, neither body moved. The two faces angled downward, eyes hollow, as if the information was running too hot to be felt all at once.

Marie, face pressed against Laura’s hair, managed to speak, though her voice was shredded. “She loved you, Laura. I know she did. She did everything she could.” She pulled back, held Laura’s faces in her hands, and said, “She named you after me.” She blinked tears from her eyes, then let go, arms dropping to her sides.

---

Laura did not move. Both bodies sat on the bench with identical posture, arms folded at the same angles, hands limp in mirrored laps. The faces, side by side in the sunlight, were not twins but something stranger: two versions of one person locked in a single decision, not about what to do, but about whether or not to stay in her own skin.

“It’s not possible,” she said. Both mouths moved in perfect sync, as if the voice had been wired through a split circuit. She turned her heads towards Marie, sharp and suspicious. “I never had an aunt. My mother never talked about any family. There was no one.” She said it flat, with a kind of flatness that hinted at the effort it took to keep the words from wobbling apart.

Marie only shook her head, once. She did not speak right away. Instead, she let her jaw work for a few seconds, her eyes gone blurry and unfocused. When she spoke, her voice came out raw, shaking, but determined not to lose its way. “She was my older sister,” Marie said. “She was my only sister. My name is Marie Williams. My sister was Sarah Williams.” The word dropped and then echoed, as if the world needed a few seconds to adjust to the idea that such a simple thing as a name could rewrite the script this late in the play.

Laura did not react, not for a long moment. The faces held, both of them—right and left, open and closed, together and apart—but the eyes were busy, raking through old files and questioning all the input. She turned her right head to Andy, as if looking for an external reality check, but his face gave nothing back. She looked at her hands. “My mother was called Precious,” she said, both voices soft now, both of them searching for handholds. “My father called her Princess, sometimes.” Both faces looked up, the words hovering. “Are you saying she lied?”

Marie’s laugh was a sob with the mask ripped off. “No. I’m saying the world lied for her,” she said. “When she came back from this place, she couldn’t speak her own name. Greg had made it so she couldn’t use it. I... I wasn't allowed to see you. I physically couldn't. But I used to come by the house, when you were at school, hoping I’d get a moment with my sister when Greg was gone, when she’d be free to talk.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, not bothering to hide the snot. “Most times, when he was around, she’d just look at me and smile and say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t remember how we know each other, but I feel like I love you.’”

The line landed, then just hung there, vibrating with a sorrow that left no safe place to put your feet. Even Dinah, perched at the edge of the scene, pressed her lips tight, as if she didn’t want to risk letting air move through it.

Laura pressed her lips into a hard, trembling line. She did not speak, but her hands, two sets of them, started to fidget: pulling at the fabric of her skirt, folding and unfolding, as if looking for some muscle memory of comfort that might still be in there.

Andy tried to say something, but the moment refused any more words. He watched Laura with a kind of helpless awe, remembering the way she used to run all the logic at once, always beating him to the finish line by three steps and making a joke about it on the way. Now, he could see the same engines burning, but the fuel was different. Her faces went pale.

“My father,” Laura said, voices hollow. “His name was Gregor. Greg.” She stayed rigid, as if she knew she’d crumple if she let herself go even just a little. “He wasn’t from Warrenville. He said he had no family, that he’d built everything for himself. He told me once, when I was ten, that his biggest regret was letting me be born. He never talked about before.”

She turned both faces to Marie, then to Andy, then to the ground. “My mother didn't have a sister,” she said. Both voices were small. “She would have told me. She would have found a way—” She stopped, unable to finish. Both hands on the left body curled into fists, the right went slack. Her eyes closed. For a long time, she sat like that, letting her body go numb to the rest of the world. Andy could see her fighting the urge to dissociate, to float above the scene and wait for the feeling to pass. But she didn’t. She let the weight land, and when she opened her eyes, they were wet but clear.

She didn’t say “I believe you.” Instead, she just said, “Why didn’t you ever come?” There was no accusation in it, just a need that had been waiting years for an answer. “Why didn’t you ever visit, or write, or try? How could there be a person I never knew, and nobody told me?”

Marie’s mouth twisted. The next words were so low it took Andy a moment to catch them. “We weren’t allowed. Greg didn't want any of us around you. And Greg didn’t let anyone near her, unless he allowed it. He liked the idea of keeping her as his, only his, the only woman in the world who obeyed him utterly. It's not that he loved her. He did it out of spite. Or he relished his power over her. The rest of us were just…” She trailed off, searching for a word that didn’t exist. “We lived in a shack, by the river. The house was for him, and Sarah, and you. The rest of us were brought in when he felt like it, used, and then sent back.” Marie’s voice was bitter. She stared at her hands, voice losing **** but not speed. “If I tried to get close to you, or to her, he’d know. And he’d punish us, and her, for it.”

Laura’s faces didn’t change, but Andy saw the way her bodies braced, as if the memory was making it hard to breathe. “But you saw her, sometimes,” she said, the voices so flat they barely registered as emotion.

Marie nodded. “A few times, when he was away. She’d remember me, sometimes, if we were quick. Or she’d be buried under his compulsions, but she’d still be happy for the company. She was always gentle with you, always careful. I thought she was doing a good job. I thought…” Marie stopped, **** on it. “I thought if I just waited long enough, it would get better. But things just kept getting worse.”

A pause, then, in a small voice full of guilt and sorrow, she said, “I’m sorry, Laura. I should have tried harder. I wanted to. I was too afraid.”

Laura didn’t move. Her faces, for a moment, wavered like they might break. Andy watched her fight the need to keep the world at arm’s length, the need to be angry, and instead just let the sadness land. He held her hand, but wanted to do more. He wanted to pull her in his arms and protect her, and he knew there would be time for it later, but this… this was hers. There was no drama to it, no curse or cry. It was just a girl, split into two bodies, letting a lifetime of loneliness prove itself in front of strangers.

Marie didn’t move to touch her. She only stared, eyes wet, hands balled in her lap. When she spoke, it was softer than before, almost a ghost. “I wish you could have known her before,” she said. “Before he broke her. She was the best person I ever met. She was brave, and funny, and smart, and she made the best out of anything.” Marie’s mouth curled into a sad smile. “She made soup once, when we were teenagers, out of nothing. I still think about that soup.”

Laura’s right face did something strange, then — a small, involuntary twitch at the corner of the mouth, the kind that arrives before the brain can stop it. Both sets of eyes blinked, and for just a moment, the absurdity of it seemed to surface: soup. Of everything. But then Laura looked at Marie, at the way she was holding the memory like it was the last warm thing she owned, and the almost-laugh died before it could become one. Her hands, all four of them, went very still. Both faces crumpled at once, a slow and total collapse, like a structure that had been holding its shape through sheer stubbornness and had finally, quietly, decided it was done.

---

Andy heard, barely, the words that came from Laura’s lips—both sets of lips, now so unnervingly coordinated that he could not look away. The words themselves slipped past him, lost in the white noise that swelled when the last tumblers in his mind clicked into place. He could see the shack at the willow-shadowed riverbank as clearly as if he were standing in its yard: a battered ranch house with windows clouded by filth, always dark, the black water of Willow Run lapping at its edge. Maybe two miles from the footbridge where he and Laura used to walk. There was a stretch of land where the willow trees overhung the water, and a derelict house behind a stand of reeds, always dark, always empty.

He remembered Myra speaking about the shack. How she’d lived in a house with her mother and “the other women,” about the man who’d come and go. She’d said that sometimes, the man would come and take her mother away, and when she came back, her mother would cry. Andy had thought, at the time, that Myra was talking about some kind of squalid sex worker commune. It was what Myra herself had come to believe. He realized now how naive that had been.

Myra, tiny, hollow-eyed, a child in the margins of a black-and-white snapshot. He’d never considered that the puzzle pieces might belong to the same box.

He didn’t so much speak as **** out the question. “Did you have a daughter, Marie?” He felt his hands go cold. “Her name—was her name Myra?”

Marie looked at him like she’d forgotten he was there at all, or as if the distance between them had suddenly grown so vast that his question had to cross a decade of noise to reach her. “Yes,” she said. Her voice was so soft and guilt-stricken and forlorn, it hardly existed. Her eyes were full of old tears. She repeated it: “Yes. Myra.” Her hands trembled. “Warrenville was small. Maybe you even knew her. I… used to tell myself I’d see her again, somewhere.”

Andy nodded—he felt the motion before he chose it, like his body was watching the scene from outside and just mimicking what a normal person might do. “Did you ever… after?” He was aware, distantly, that his question made no sense. “Did you ever see her again?”

Marie shook her head, and the motion seemed to cost her. “I tried to keep her, for as long as I could. Greg—he never wanted another child in the house, not after Laura was born. I thought—keeping her with me was selfish. It was no life for a child. I thought if I gave her up, she could have a real life. Maybe even be happy.”

The words landed with a quiet, awful finality. Andy’s mind flashed: Myra, at seven, sitting alone at a cafeteria table in the group home, tearing open a packet of saltines; Myra at thirteen, eyes cold and calculating, always watching, never trusting because she believed her own mother had betrayed her.

He turned to Laura. She was watching him with both sets of eyes, and was openly reeling. The bond between them, that subtle current he’d always felt, was a live wire now. He could feel her confusion, pain, and fear, all at once, all braided together. For a half second he wanted to reach out and take her hand, but some insight told him that was not what the moment required. In that moment, he realized he was not just about to upend Marie’s world—he was going to upend Myra’s, too.

“She’s here,” Andy said. He couldn’t believe how small his voice sounded. “Myra’s here. She’s upstairs. She’s been in my harem for the last month.”

Marie stared, then her legs just quit on her. Laura caught her easily, both bodies rising as if connected by the same set of strings, and eased Marie onto the bench. Marie’s fingers wrapped around Laura’s wrists, not for comfort but for anchoring—she needed to know the girl was real, not another fantasy conjured by the Garden. Her eyes were wide and wet.

Andy didn’t move. For once, he didn’t even try to narrate himself through the crisis; he just watched, unwilling to break whatever spell hovered over the ruined reunion. Laura, holding Marie upright, seemed to freeze for a long moment. Andy could see it working behind her eyes—the math of it, the way every possible permutation had to be accounted for, line by line, until only one solution remained.

Andy watched as Laura, holding Marie upright, went very still. He could see it happening behind her eyes — both pairs of them — the way a person looks when arithmetic becomes something unbearable. Myra was Greg’s. Myra was Marie’s. And Laura was Greg’s, too. Laura’s mouths opened, then closed.

“Myra,” Laura said, and both voices vibrated with the shock of self-recognition. “She’s my half-sister.”

Andy’s mouth opened, but he had nothing to add. The word hung in the air, gaining weight by the second.

Then she added. “And my cousin, too.” The two faces blinked in perfect sync. “Both things at once,” Laura finished, low. “Isn’t that a trick.”

Marie managed to look up, tears running down her cheeks. “She was a good kid,” she said. “She deserved better. I wanted to find her someday, to tell her I was sorry. That I should have fought harder to keep her.” The words came out choked, each one a small defeat.

Andy could feel a tremor running through the Garden itself, as if the entire universe of the Hollow had been waiting for someone to name this particular sorrow. Even Dinah, so stoic that her bones seemed made of marble, looked shaken—her face gone white, her eyes fixed on the women before her with an almost hungry attention.

The silence after was total. Andy couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt a quiet like this.

He tried to gather his own thoughts, but the old logic was gone, replaced with a kind of stunned vertigo. He remembered what Arabella had said about the cycle of the island, about the way the past repeats until someone chooses to break it. He wondered if this was the moment—if naming the pattern was enough to start changing it, or if they were just another set of puppets being **** through the same old drama.

He looked to Arabella, then, expecting her to intervene, to say something that would put all this in context. But she didn’t move. She watched the scene with her hands folded, lips pressed tight, eyes shining with tears she would not let fall. She seemed to be waiting.

Nobody replied. Not Dinah, not Eden, not even Arabella, who stood watching with her hands folded and her eyes wet.

Andy's mind was still moving, turning over what Marie had said about the shack, about the women kept there, about children taken away or given up or simply lost. He thought of the dog-woman they had passed on the path earlier, the one lying in the sun with the three Mildreds attending her so carefully. He had not placed her then. He placed her now. Sandra. Also from the shack. Also Greg's. Also a mother who had not been allowed to keep what was hers.

Andy looked at Arabella. He’d been looking at her the whole time, and each time he’d said something awful, her face had told him he was right before the words left his mouth. Now he thought about Sandra, the other woman from Greg’s harem whom he knew had had a baby. The dog-woman who’d given up her baby, who couldn’t even hold that child.

“What happened to Sandra’s baby?” Andy asked, his own voice a dull blade.

Arabella was very still for a long time, so long the silence started to buzz at the edges. When she spoke, it was with a care Andy had never heard in her before.

“The child was placed for adoption soon after birth. She found a loving family, and the only thing she carried from her mother was the name Sandra gave her, before she let her go. A wish, for her to be brave.”

Andy waited.

“She called her Riley,” Arabella said. “That is her name.”