Four months of waking in the half-second before memory arrived, that mercy of blankness, and then memory arriving.
Niko is dead.
Every single morning, the same sentence, delivered fresh, as though my body refused to file it and made me learn it again at dawn.
I had learned to function inside it.
I could hold a conversation inside it, could nod and pass the rolls and let my father talk, and none of them ever guessed that the whole time some interior part of me was standing very still in a field somewhere, holding a triangle of folded cloth.
They mistook my composure for coldness.
They always had.
It never occurred to them that the composure was the single hardest thing I did all day, that the flat calm they found so irritating in me was a discipline I was maintaining by main force, one hour at a time, so that I would not simply lie down on their kitchen floor and stop.
Chapter 2 — The Phone in the Dark
It was my sister.
Delphina never called before nine unless she wanted something, and she did not say good morning.
“There you are,” she said, as though I’d been hiding, as though it were not her who had woken me, or would have if I’d been asleep.
“Mom and Dad talked it over.
Cato needs your room.
