I swallow, the lump in my throat dry as a hairball. “Uncle Teddy is the best.” I sound far away—like I’m hearing my own voice spoken back to me, down a tunnel. “He’s all I have now. Him, Aunt Marion, Manon, you.” Until Mama is back, I think. Saxim watches me with a tender mix of pity, horror, and love. I shouldn’t be able to stand it. But it’s so honest, it just makes me want to cry some more.

I wish she wouldn’t look at me that way.

When I start to cry this time, wiping my nose on Mickey’s ear, she wraps me in a hug. “I’m sorry about your dad,” she whispers in my hair, tugging the T-shirt straight. “I know how much you loved him.”

And I wasn’t thinking about him before, but now I am—thinking about him and the fact that how much you love someone doesn’t matter if you’re too late to tell them properly. Like, I always shouted weloveyadad every time we hung up the phone, but I just can’t stop thinking about how he lived in that drab and lifeless sickroom alone, for who knows how long, hiding out from the men who turned on him, calling him sick, paranoid, irresponsible (I read the articles—I read all of them) and pushed him out of his own company, giving him an honorary title that meant nothing.

The same men who did something to Mama, to make her hide herself away.

Dad knew it, and he tried to root out the evil. That must have been why everything soured for him at Hero Pharm. It must have been.

Not because he was sick. But because when he lost his trust in Hero Pharm, they turned on him, the paranoid hermit founder, leaving him to rot here, in the dark.

But I say none of this aloud. Because I know a part of myself would love to stop in self-pity city all night long and just feed off of Saxim’s sympathy—if she’d give me any. So instead, I bring my hands to my wet eyes, letting the tears soak into my skin like some kind of janky serum, and melt away.

“Can you tell me about your life, Monty? I’ve been so rude. And I’ve missed you so much,” I say, as soon as I find my voice. I sound crystalline and breakable.

She watches me carefully, and her shoulders soften. When she speaks, I don’t say anything for a while. I only listen and absorb, aware it’s something I don’t do often enough. As she talks, I settle back onto the cushions, and she reaches out and smooths my hairline.