“I’ve known your face all my life. First from my father’s pictures, in your file that he kept in his office at home. The way your skin deepens somehow while the others go pale. The way he said immediately that you were something more. I knew your voice, from the recordings he listened to constantly. Even while you were living with the Professor for the first free year and then while you lived alone, my father was always worrying over you.”

“And did you? Worry over me?”

“No. Never.”

I held my own cheek in the cup of my hand, closing my eyes to listen to the smile changing his voice.

“I mooned. I watched the movie reels from the social events, from a brunch with your mah-jongg club and from the night you went to the Mount Royal Hotel debut. It was difficult to look away. You were always stunning.”

I’d never been a Dolores to him, never just another extraction of my Source, whose wedding he’d attended (though he could not recall the dress she’d worn). The night I’d felt most glamorous, Harvey Parrish had seen me.

“How old were you by then?” I asked, my eyes still closed, my smile still cradled in the palm of my hand.

“Twenty-two.” His voice was amused. “I’d just arrived at the Vault. Finally. And you weren’t here. Of course you weren’t. And I was glad.”

I opened my eyes. That part I didn’t understand—why would he be glad over my absence? I let it pass easily; even real people mustn’t understand everything.

“I’m here now,” I told him.

And his chest swelled. “Yes. You are.”

Surely he would reach for me now. I knew by the way his brow fell, as though realizing he always could have.

“But now that you’re here...”

The light in his eyes whispered a million lovely things that he had yet to say—things that he would, in time. The promise made the prospect of life under lock and key bearable.

“Seeing you inside these walls, I understand. It’s because you must be here that I remember what you are.”

My shoulders crept up slowly—too slowly to protect myself from the words I’d felt more than heard.

What you are.

The part of me I hadn’t known before meeting Harvey was woefully unguarded, but I’d realized it too late. Because immediately I knew what he meant. I’d heard those words before, in my mother’s voice, though she’d written them down.