I got lucky. I came home. Dehydrated and confused, but still, I came home. Mom can even laugh about it now, the way I came out of the woods and told her the aliens had stolen her real baby.

Grandma never learned to laugh about it. There had still been shadows in her eyes when she died a decade ago, more than twenty years after I’d been taken, and she was never easy with me the way she was with my little sister. It was like, by being hurt, I had become an invitation for the universe to do more harm, and she couldn’t let herself love me out of fear that the next time something happened, it would be the last time.

I miss her. I never understood her, but I miss her. She never understood me either, but in a way, I think she understood me better than my mother did, because she realized I wasn’t kidding. She did need to worry about the aliens.

“Stasia?” Lucas’s voice was accompanied by a light knock on my bedroom doorframe. I turned away from the window with only a faint pang of regret. The sun and I would see each other again. The sun and I always did.

Roommate number one, and the owner of the house: Lucas Evans. Tall, skinny, with a collection of vintage cartoon T-shirts only a geek could love, and a girlfriend who kept her apartment on Capitol Hill more out of the love of lizards than any other motivation. He was holding a plate that I found honestly way more interesting than his face, because the plate was covered in waffles, and the waffles smelled amazing.

“For me?” I asked.

“You’re still in your pajamas,” he said.

“That’s good. I can get syrup on my pajamas and be on time for work without needing to change my clothes twice.” I held out my hands, opening and closing them in the classic “gimme” gesture. “Waffles.”

“Don’t you need to be at work soon? You should probably put clothes on.”

“Waffles,” I repeated, with more urgency. I opened and closed my hands with more vigor. “Mars needs waffles. Give me the waffles.”

“Put on your clothes,” Lucas countered, and shut my bedroom door, the waffles still in his hand, but now shut out in the hall where I could neither see nor smell them.

“Asshole!” I called amiably, and went digging for clothes.