I didn’t want to lie to her, so I tiptoed around it by saying, “Well, and I felt a little sick. It was really hot.” Both true.

“Kiki—”

“Oh!” I said excitedly, shamelessly interrupting her before the conversation became Something. “You’ll never believe what Emily told me today! Her mum is going to have another baby.”

Just like that, Mum was distracted. It was cool that Emily was going to have a baby brother or another sister, but I wasn’t really all that interested in babies. Mum, on the other hand, loved babies. I was pretty sure she’d have had at least five of her own if my dad hadn’t died before I was born.

“A new baby!” Mum cooed. “Hand me my phone, will you, duckling? I’ll text Mei and see if she needs anything.”

“Can I look through your stash of blank notebooks while you’re on the phone? I’ve run out of space in my sketchbook.”

“Yes, of course.”

I left her excitedly tapping out a text to Emily’s mum, and went upstairs to the room Mum used as her home office. She worked in animation, so she usually went to a studio to work with a team of other animators on a project, but she also did some teaching and tried to work from home whenever she could. Which meant her home office got a lot of use and was filled with student essays, storyboards, piles of research materials, her shiny computer monitor and graphics tablet, and her bookshelves, including an entire shelf crammed with empty notebooks and sketchpads.

I edged around a stack of books to get to the shelf. I picked up the one on top—The Illustrated Book of Indian Folklore: Vol. I, a beautiful, enormous thing Mum had read to me when I was little. And, yes, it was only volume one, because it turned out there was a lot of Indian folklore. Stories of monsters and gods and heroes, of goddesses who rode lions, of demons who kidnapped princesses, of kings and queens and cities and snarky jackals and, well, a whole lot more than that, too.

I’d loved those stories. They’d been special to Mum, stories she’d grown up with in Karnataka, in the south of India, where she’d spent half her life before moving here.

After putting The Illustrated Book of Indian Folklore: Vol. I back on the stack of books, I checked the shelf of empty notebooks. There were a few that would do the trick, but I kept looking for The One. Like a warrior choosing her sword or a witch choosing her wand, I, Kiki Kallira, had to choose my new sketchbook. It was not a task to be taken lightly. The wrong choice could prove to be the undoing of the universe!

And then I found it. It was beautiful, bound in white spirals, with two hundred thick sheets of clean white art paper. The cover was a perfect, soft buttery yellow, the exact color of evening sunshine.