“Past, she was overworked and we failed her,” my mom said, her voice stern. “All of us failed her. Present, she’s alone except for the company of those villains because she’s scared to maintain contact with us. She’s scrabbling for support structures, and she seems to be maintaining good standards and goals. That’s commendable. Future? That’s up to us. People are defined by the supports they have around them. If we don’t give her something to come back to, then she’s going to stay with them. Her perspective will skew, because all perspectives warp when there’s nobody around to help keep them straight. Don’t use the past-present-future framing of argument on me when I taught it to you.”

“Somehow, in all of this, we aren’t holding her accountable for her own actions?” I asked. “Because I kind of remember this dynamic of a teenage girl bouncing around and being passed around to wherever she could be useful until she passed briefly into some ugly Slaughterhouse Nine hands and lost it. Lost it with casualties in the process. Me. Herself. But also me. Then she gets to fucking act like herself for one singularly stupid, horrifying—”

I choked on my words, too pissed to form a sentence.

“One act,” Sveta said.

“Or chain of acts. Or one act that sets her on a road where her choices are all bad. I don’t know. But she still chose,” I said. “And she had opportunities later, and she made more bad choices. Ones with casualties.”

I heard my mom sigh. The restaurant was so quiet, the city outside even quieter than usual because the cold weather meant people weren’t venturing out as much, it was crunch time at the various jobs around here, and it was still a bit too early for lunch breaks. The light snow had its faint effect on the sound of the outside world.

It was so easy to imagine we were all in this place, and there was nobody else in the universe.

My mom spoke, “If Amy took it upon herself to touch villains and alter the broken reward cycles, if Amy wanted to give them a conscience, or if Amy wanted to fix whatever was broken in their physiology that made them aggressive, I’m not about to say no. If there’s any risk to the—”

I dropped my eyes to the table. The ‘Amy’ refrain was endless and the song was one I didn’t want to hear. Amy, Amy, Amy, Amy. It was like a rock against my skull. Not necessarily enough to penetrate with the first blow, but chipping away, giving me a headache, and so fucking crude, stupid, and raw.

And, worse, it was a refrain that echoed my mentality those two years ago. Amy. Amy. Amy. I need her, I want her. It had been my mind for all that time.