I wanted to scream. To accuse her of delusion. But something held me back. Something in her tone. In the gravity of it.
“Then why don’t I remember you?” I asked. “If you were family once, if you were real, why don’t I remember anything?”
“Maybe there are more things you don’t remember, Celestine.”
My world paused.
My lungs forgot how to breathe.
Because something in me knew she wasn’t lying.
I didn’t remember my childhood clearly.
Just flashes. Scraps. My mother’s perfume, jasmine and dust, a piano in the sunroom. A birthday with no candles, and Adrian.
Always Adrian.
He was the beginning of everything I remembered clearly. Four years of him and me. My memory began where he began, and before that? White noise.
Faded walls.
A child’s drawing crumpled in a drawer.
I stared at Isadora.
She stared back.
“You’re lying…” I whispered in disbelief.
“I wish I were.”
“I don’t believe you!”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “But the truth doesn’t need your belief to exist.”
Zagreus said nothing, even when my eyes burned and I held back my tears.
“Why now?” I whispered. “Why are you here now?”
Isadora’s gaze softened. Her daughter was almost embarrassed.
“Because you’re in danger,” Isadora said.
And suddenly the room got colder.
The flames in the hearth seemed to dim.
Zagreus tensed beside me. I felt his hold tightening.
I turned to him, and then back to her. “From whom?”
“From the people who buried the first half of your life,” she continued. “And from the man sitting next to you.”
Zagreus let out a low breath, something between amusement and menace. “Careful, Isadora.”
‘I’ve been careful my whole life,” she said. “And look where it got me.”
My vision swam. I wanted to run and hide, but I did neither. I sat there, crushed into the side of the man who murdered the boy I loved, staring into the eyes of a woman who claimed to be blood. And for the very first time, I realised I didn’t know where I came from.
