I know her heart is paining her but I am not caring.

He is my son, she is saying to me with tears falling from her eye.

That is not changing what he is doing to me.

She is looking at me for long time, and I am thinking she is looking for something from me. Maybe she is looking for me to be changing my voice or how I am standing, for my body to not be tensing like this. Maybe she is looking for me to be saying, I forgive him, and also be saying, I forgive you for loving him.

But I am not saying any of these thing. I am never saying any of these thing.

And she is seeing this and she is turning and she is walking away.

CHAPTER

53

Grace is at Ify’s side as nurse’s assistants transport the first child into a separate operating room. She has all her note-taking materials out in front of her, stylus forever poised over her tablet screen, but Ify can see that the girl is too riveted by what she’s witnessing to document it.

It had come to Ify in a dream. Céline used to joke, while they were in school, that this was Ify’s superpower. She could conjure the right answer out of thin air, and all she needed was enough sleep.

The epiphany: words whispering a melody, indistinct and blurring together, while a circle formed out of thin air, inky and writhing. Ify remembers the circle, then another. All the while, words surround her and come together to make images of people and places and reveal snapshots of human beings caught in the throes of their living. And the circle means something, but in the dream, Ify couldn’t tell what. She remembers she had been leaning forward when caught up in the vision, but in the dream, she begins to lean back and passively accept the circle and the images and words swimming around her, then another circle appears on top of it, so that their edges are just barely touching, then another and another until six circles sit in formation before her, and they remain like this, like rings of black fire, until more circles join them, forming a honeycomb pattern. It was as she was leaning back, letting the sight fill her vision, that she saw the greater image. More and more rings of black fire joined the assemblage, and when it looked like they were going to turn into an entire wall of black, Ify saw it. Or, rather, felt it.