“Oh.” Ajay’s eyes were big. “I’m sorry about your mom.” Two years ago, he’d moved to Portland from Seattle, so he only knew the Bridget she was now, not the Bridget she’d been as a kid. The Bridget who used to laugh a lot. The Bridget who’d had friends, until she had pared them all away to focus on her dying mother.

She took a deep breath. “I shouldn’t have said it so abruptly. My mom had cancer, so it wasn’t like her death came as a surprise. There were three or four years where she was either undergoing treatment or trying to recover. No matter what the doctors did, the cancer always came back. But those books—they took her out of herself. I begged her to read them to me, but she said I was too young. So I snuck King of Swords into my room and read it when my parents were asleep.” As she spoke, she felt her past selves crowding in.

She was eight, hiding under the covers with a flashlight and King of Swords. The fictional murders and monsters were less frightening than her suddenly bald mother.

She was ten, reading aloud for long hours, with the occasional correction or explanation from her mom. Her mom’s hair was as short as a boy’s. It had grown back curly after the chemotherapy.

She was eleven, lying side by side with her once-more bald mom in her parents’ bedroom. Trying to help them both escape the pain by slipping into another world.

She was twelve, sitting in a chair next to the hospital bed set up in the living room, reading aloud until her voice cracked. Now her mom found the slightest touch painful, so Bridget could no longer lie next to her. Her mom lay flat on her back, arms and legs so skinny they were barely bumps under the blankets. But her swollen belly was the size of a basketball, filled with fluid her failing liver could no longer process. By now, Bridget was on her fifth time through the books. As she read, she kept checking her mom’s yellow-tinged face for the faintest smile of pleasure. Listening for a sigh when a character died. There were no surprises left in the book, no shocks, yet the plots still touched them both.

Those last few weeks of her mom’s life, Bridget read to her every free moment. Even when her mom seemed asleep or possibly unconscious, she didn’t stop. She was spinning a rope of words, trying to keep her mother anchored to her. An hour after she finished rereading Court of Sorrows, the last book then available in the series, her mother slipped from life to death.