Page 28 of Dragon 7

She walked across a stage in a black graduation gown with a flat cap on her head, and a man read her name aloud.

I sat in the audience beside Kenji, both of us gray now, both of us softened by all the years we had been given. He gripped my hand so hard it hurt, and his jaw worked the way it did when he refused to let himself cry, and a tear escaped him anyway and ran down into the lines of his handsome face.

On the stage, our daughter found us in the crowd, lifted her diploma over her head, and grinned at us.

And we grinned back, two old fools weeping in a room full of strangers over the only thing we had ever made together that mattered.

And then the years rolled forward once more.

My daughter appeared again, much more mature and standing in a kitchen full of morning light with a little baby of her own, sleeping in her arms.

She crossed the room to me, and I sat older than I had ever imagined growing, and she lowered that small warm baby into my lap. "Hold her, Mama."

Kenji bent over my shoulder. His long silver hair fell forward as he took in his granddaughter, and his big hand trembled as he touched her cheek.

Warm.

My grandbaby was warm in my lap.

Even here.

Even on the cold stone.

She had that same impossible heat as her mother when she was just a baby too. I curled my arms to bring her closer. To hold both of them at once across all those years—the new grand baby and the daughter who grew into a woman.

No.

I gasped, and it all disappeared.

Tears spilled from my eyes.

The flashes broke over me all at once, the bicycle, the dress, the stage, and the grandchild, every stolen year of her, and I understood with a clarity that gutted me that none of it would ever come.

I would never hold her.

Kenji would never run beside her in the grass.

Hiro and Reo would never glare at her date.

We would never weep in that graduation hall, and we would never greet her daughter—our grandchild.

I was burying all of those precious memories tonight. Every version of her. Every year she would have lived. And she would never know. She would never get the chance to be angry at me for it. She would never exist enough to forgive me.

Oh God.

The tears blurred my view.

Before I sat on this stone, I said I would own this. I would sacrifice her with my eyes open, and I would carry the weight of this decision for the rest of my life.

I thought back to the Itako’s screaming about that bad timeline, and placed it against the bright memories I had just watched die behind my eyes.

I would mourn the bright memories forever.

I would let them die so that bad timeline could never be born.

Sniffling, I wiped my tears away. “Yes. . .I’m ready.”

The Death Guardian’s eyes watered. "Then we will begin. Lay back, Tora."