Ted was gone and all the pain that had been shared between us rushed into me. I had not known the body was capable of standing so much. I tried to follow him down, inside. But he had locked the door against me. I wonder if he could hear me screaming, from down there. I expect he could.

Mommy put us back in our little bed when she was done. The gauze was itchy over the stitches but I knew better than to scratch. The room was full of moving shadow and the mouse’s pink eyes gleamed where it watched from its cage.

I’m scared, I tried to tell Teddy. Teddy didn’t answer. He was deep in a good place full of black tails and green eyes and soft coats. I tried not to cry but I couldn’t help it.

I felt Ted soften toward me. “You can sleep now, Lauren,” he said. “Someone else will watch.”

I heard the pad of great paws as Night-time came upstairs. I sank into the soft black.

I was woken in the morning by his weeping. Ted had found Snowball’s bloody bones in the cage. He was so sorry about it. “Poor Snowball,” he whispered over and over. “It isn’t fair.” He cried more about that mouse than he did about the new little railway of black sutures that ran down our back. He wasn’t there when it was done, I guess. He didn’t feel it. I did, each one.

Ted knew it wasn’t Night-time’s fault. Night-time was just obeying his nature. Ted told Mommy that the mouse got out of its cage, and a stray cat got it. It was true, in a way. Of course, Mommy didn’t believe him. She took Teddy to the woods and told him to hide who he was. She thought he had a hunger in him. Ted was afraid that she would find a way to take Olivia and Night-time away. (And then it would be just me and him. He didn’t want that.) So he let her think it was the old sickness, the one her father had, the one who kept his pets in the crypt beneath the iliz.

I had begun to understand what Ted could not—what he would not allow himself to know. Each time the thought bobbed up he pushed it down harder, harder. Up it came again like a cork or a corpse surfacing. The sickness had indeed been passed down, though not to Ted. I wonder what the people of Locronan would say, if you asked them why they cast Mommy out. Maybe they have a different story to hers. Maybe it wasn’t her father who had the sickness.