“That’s an understatement. I can’t stop worrying about Jilly—she’s been gone so long.”

“That might not mean anything,” Timony said. “Time moves differently in different parts of the otherworld.”

“I know. But then I’m also . . .”

I hesitated a moment, but knew I had to talk to someone. It might be easier with folks I didn’t know so well.

“I’m also worried about what happens when she does get back,” I said.

Lizzie and Timony both waited for me to go on.

“It’s just we’ve been best friends forever,” I explained, “only it was always just that. Friends.”

“I have to tell you,” Lizzie said. “When you and Jilly showed up at the hotel—and doesn’t that feel like a million years ago?—I thought the two of you were already a couple. I didn’t know any different until your sister got all excited.”

“Christiana’s pretty much an ‘in the now’ person, and she tends to wear her emotions on her sleeve.”

“From the way you say it, I take it that’s not the case with the rest of your family.”

I hesitated a moment. Where did you even begin explaining Christiana?

I settled for, “She didn’t really grow up with the rest of us.”

“She’s not even . . . “ the doonie started to add, but broke off and gave me an embarrassed look. “I’m sorry,” he said

“It’s okay,” I told him. I looked to Lizzie. “What Timony started to say is that she isn’t human.”

I gave her the short explanation, the one Christiana had given me, how she was my brother Christy’s shadow: all the bits of himself that he hadn’t liked when he was six or seven that he somehow rolled up into a bundle and cast off. Except she ended up having a life of her own. Took a name that was part his and part that of a girl he’d had a crush on in grade school, and there she was. Christiana Tree. She used the surname because that’s what Christy called her for years, before she’d tell him who she really was. To him, she was Mystery. So, she liked to call herself Ms. Tree.

“If you’d tried to tell me this a few days ago,” Lizzie said, “I’d have thought you were nuts. But now it almost doesn’t seem weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So, do we all have these shadows?”

“Fairy don’t,” Timony put in.