Ursula and Elliot looked to Adeline. She rolled her lips together, like she didn’t want to say. “We thought that once. We didn’t know better. It turns out, when a person is missing such a big piece of themselves, they’re not themselves anymore. They become…hollow. Same shape, but nothing keeping them going inside. It only took us a few accidental hollowings before we figured out you have to give the reverie back, all of it, or you might as well just kill a person.”

“Who did that happen to?” Kane asked.

Now Kane couldn’t look away from Adeline. She stared at him, past him, and for a moment he felt like he had her power and could see a person’s memories dancing deep in their depths.

“My grandmother,” she said.

The room went too quiet. Ursula pushed herself up and began pulling pans into the sink. Elliot might as well have turned himself invisible. Adeline and Kane were locked in a staring match.

“People get hurt when we mess up this bad,” Adeline said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know.”

He flinched. “Yeah? And whose fault is that, Adeline?”

She snorted, then addressed the room with patronizing cheer. “So when are we going to talk about how, on his first official mission back, Kane went ahead and smuggled an entire-ass drag queen sorceress into a reverie, and it cost an old lady her life?”

“She’s not dead,” Kane said, heat rising to his cheeks.

“Well then what is she, dream boy?” Adeline spread her fingers toward the small kitchen. “Where is she?”

Hadn’t they seen what Kane had seen?

“She’s in her reverie. She was happy in there, before we messed it up.”

“Happy?” Adeline shoved back her chair, standing. “You think she’s living happily ever after, locked into a fake world on the wrist of that glittering maniac? Jesus, Kane, you’re as delusional as ever, but at least you used to know the difference between right and wrong.”

“I know wrong.” Kane stood, too. “Unlike the three of you when you destroyed Helena’s love story. If any of you stopped for a second and looked at her, I mean really took a look, you would have seen what I saw. She was a person, not a plot.”

Adeline’s knuckles turned tan as she grasped the back of her chair, and her voice went low. “Exactly. She was. She no longer is, all thanks to you and that witch.”

A commotion broke the tension as two small boys raced into the kitchen, pursued closely by Ursula’s father. He was a gargantuan man—like a lumbering cottage, really—but he deftly swooped the two kids over his shoulders. They screamed and reached for Ursula.