This, today, was that same betrayal playing out its endgame. Something had changed in Lena during those years away. Nic’s joy and gratitude at having her girl back was so great it had blinded her to the fact that Lena had turned into her bloody mother. Someone who thought she knew what was best for everyone else, who interfered in things that were none of her business. Someone who took it upon herself to do shit that no one asked her to do and then acted like a blessed martyr about it.

Like mother, like daughter! It wasn’t supposed to be that way. From the minute Lena slid into the world she’d been Nic’s girl. There in that miserable backyard, that drunk fool too busy performing disgust for his drunk fool mates around the fire to take his perfect baby, and Mum, now that the ambos had arrived, occupied with keeping little Will away from his gore-soaked mother, and so it was Nic who, seconds after the ambo had cut the cord and tied it off, took the squirming little wonder into her arms. Nic who kissed the terrifyingly soft head and rubbed the impossibly perfect little arms. Nic who opened her own shirt and held the baby against her bare skin in the back of the ambulance, just like the paramedic suggested. Nic’s skin that gave primordial comfort to Lena’s panicked newborn spirit, Nic’s heart that set the rhythm of Lena’s, her breath that dried Lena’s first tears.

They’re murmuring out there; the sound of it throbs through the space and burrows into her chest. She can’t bear it. Can’t. The pain of dragging her busted body up is better than sitting in this crypt letting their conspiring thrum through her.