Yes, I say. The feeling is just like being enclosed in loving arms. We sit for a while, holding each other.

In the living room, Ted groans.

“He’s coming,” she says. “I have to go. I’ll try and come back soon.”

She touches me gently, comforting. “You opened the door between us, Olivia. It will be different now.” And then she is gone.

I used to spend all my time wishing Ted would come home. Now all I want is for him to stay away.

I feel weird because even though it is such an awful situation, I love having Lauren around. She is fun to talk to. We talk or play or just sit together. It is really nice, like having one of the kits in my litter with me again. I suppose that’s what Lauren is. She can make it feel like she’s stroking me or hugging me, though it’s just in our mind. The music stops her from using our body. It’s like being tied up but not gagged, she says, and I shudder at her matter-of-fact tone, because she sounds so young, and no one should know how those things feel.

Tonight we are curled up together on the couch in the dark house. Outside, the trees spread fingers against the moonlight. The cord is a soft black, invisible against the night. Ted is passed out, the stone-dead kind of passed out, upstairs. We whisper to each other.

“If I still had my feet we could run away,” Lauren says. “Just run.”

Can you see me? I ask. I can’t see you. I wish I could. I want to know what you look like.

Ted has made sure that there are no reflective surfaces in the house.

“I’m glad you can’t,” she says. “Too much has been done to our body. I feel you, though. You’re warm—it’s nice, like someone is sitting by my side.”

I try not to think about the body, Lauren’s body, that she says we both live in. I kind of only half believe her. I can feel my fur, my whiskers, my tail. How can that not be real?

You know, there’s another one, I say. There are three of us. He’s called Night-time.

“I think there are more than three,” she says. “I hear them sometimes, when I’m very deep down. I try not to. I don’t like it when the little ones cry.”

Deep down?

“There are other levels. I need to show you all that.”

Fear strokes me, a dark feather. I purr anxiously to make the feeling stop.

“Don’t you think, Olivia,” and I can hear the wet catch in her voice, “that it would be better if none of us had been born?”