“It won’t help. Seeing other versions of our baby doesn’t allow me to sleep through the night. If anything, knowing makes it worse, because now I can put images to the nightmares that haunt me.”

“I don’t care,” I say fiercely. Nothing will keep me away from my child. Not his flimsy need to protect me. Not even time itself. “She’s my baby, too. I deserve to know what happened to her. What I did to her.”

He nods again. He knows me so well. He always knew I would insist. “She was four years old in the first thread I visited. A beautiful little girl with a gap between her front teeth. We knew we would never be able to fix it, but we didn’t mind. We thought the gap only added to her perfection. She had a pair of striped pajamas, with a shark on the chest, that she wore every day. That is, until the burns spread across her body. The wounds were so raw, so gaping, that even the brush of that soft fabric was too painful. She cried when we took them away. She thought she was being punished, and she promised that she would be a good girl again, if only we would give back her pajamas.

“In another thread, Hope was just a newborn when she was exposed. So small that she still fit on my forearm. You put those little mittens on her so that she wouldn’t scratch herself, and you cried so much that your tears fell on her face like rain. She would never feel actual rain, you told me. On account of us living underground. On account of her life being so short. So you were giving her that experience, in the only way you could.

“And then, there was the time she was eight years old and understood exactly what was happening to her—”

“Stop,” I say hoarsely. One of these days, I’ll listen to all of Bandit’s stories. I’ll write down every detail. If some version of my baby had to suffer through those atrocities, then the least I can do is hear the specifics. Embrace them. Keep the stories in my soul where they belong. Where they live now.

But at this moment, guilt and sorrow lacerate my heart, and each word rips the gashes a little more. Each sentence sprinkles the salt a little more liberally.

“You’re not to blame,” Bandit says. “We did this together. We did what we thought was right.”

I almost laugh. What is right, and what is wrong? In this world, morality doesn’t exist. There is no good decision. There are only the choices that we made. The ones we decided were the less of two evils. The ones we’ll bear forever on our souls.