She looked straight into the light of the window. The light must have hurt her eyes. I understood, now, this habit of hers, which I had seen her do so often before. It was a trick not to cry … or if tears were shed, for them to seem due to nothing more than strong light. “I don’t know,” she said. “Raven promised me that she found him a good home. She said it would do me no good to know where. I believed her because I was desperate to believe her. Now I believe what I refused to believe then: that she brought him to the boys’ orphanage, where he starved or died or grew up to be Un-Kith or was apprenticed to someone in the Ward, and is almost grown out of being a child, is almost an early man. I look for him when I walk in the Ward. I used to hope I might find him. Now I know he is grown past recognition, and I would never recognize him even if I saw him.”

“But if this is true, how could you continue to work for her? How could you not leave?”

She shrugged. “Raven is powerful in the Ward. You know this. No one would hire me if I left her. I would become Un-Kith.”

“You want to hurt me. You want to take away the one person who cares for me.”

She gripped my hand and pinned it to the table. She squeezed it. “I care for you.”

My tears finally spilled over even as Morah’s eyes stayed dry. “I don’t believe you,” I said, but I did. I had seen it with my own eyes: her cuddling a ghost baby, her keeping knives out of a ghost child’s reach. “Maybe she meant what she said. You must have been so young. Maybe she was trying to help you.”

“It was my child.” Her hand was hard on mine. “She had no right.”

“Why have you told me this? You want me to hate her.”

“Yes. I do want you to hate her, for your own sake.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You have a chance to leave. You must take it. You must not stay here, hoping that Raven will love you like a daughter. She never will.”

“What chance?” I said, but I guessed already what she would say.

“The High lady. She has taken an interest in you.”

“As her servant.”

Morah shook her head. “Why did the orphanage mistress teach you to read? She didn’t teach me. Why does Raven keep you so close? Why have you caught Aden’s heart, when every girl in the Ward wants him? There is something special in you. A shine. When people see it, they want it. That High lady is no different. If she offers to take you from the Ward, you must go. Promise me.”