It would take a lot of work to be a character in both stories without becoming two characters. Or one, split in half.

But it was work I could do, so I would do it, even if I felt tangled and torn along the way.

For a long time, I’d thought that people simply were who they were and became who they became. But I didn’t think that anymore.

“Hasn’t he woken up again?” I asked.

My mother shook her head. “Not yet.”

I went to the side of the bed, looked at my father’s still face, and said, “Wake up, Daddy.”

But he didn’t wake. Or move at all.

I looked over my shoulder. Met my mother’s eyes.

I reached out and shook my father by the shoulder.

It was like shaking a bag of seed.

“Ellie, don’t,” my mother said. “Let him be.”

“Daddy, wake up,” I said again.

But he didn’t.

My mother left the room.

Esther started to read again. “‘“I suppose you are real?” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. “The Boy’s Uncle made me Real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”’”

Which was the only thing I wanted in that moment. For some things to last for always. And other things to end.

—

I found my mother in the kitchen, at the stove, doing nothing.

“He’ll wake up again,” I said. “I know he will.”

She turned to look at me.

Her eyes narrowed. “What’s that?” she said, coming to finger the blood splattered on the jacket I was wearing. “Is that blood?”

“It’s—”

“Take it off,” she said roughly, working the buttons free. “Take it off this minute.”

Which I did, quick as I could.

She snatched it away and thrust it under the pump, drenching it with cold water again, working tallow soap into it, her hands turning red as she worked.

I didn’t say, It will come clean. I didn’t say, Daddy will make me another one. I didn’t say, I can learn to stitch ivy like that.

I thought of Cate as she smelled the hot chisel I’d meant to use on her wound. The alarm on her face. The relief when I hung it straight to cool.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, as tangled up as I’d ever been, and went out into the yard to look at the sky and try to know what I couldn’t know.

The sun was slipping down the far side of the day, and the shadows were slowly unspooling like black ribbons across the yard.

I wanted to follow them.

I wanted to stay where I was.