Chapter Text
To Walk in Shadow
(Worm/Chronicles of Amber)
by P.H Wise
3.9 - Assassinations and Complications
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. Worm belongs to Wildbow. The Chronicles of Amber is by Roger Zelazny. I own neither. Please support the official release.
Thanks to Cailin for beta-reading.
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When I was done at the Parahuman Response Team’s headquarters, I set about my next task: tracking down my magical tutor. I didn’t know what he might have gotten up to since the last time I’d seen him, and that worried me. I tried calling him by name until he came to me, but he didn’t respond. There wasn’t any mention of him or anyone resembling him on PHO, at least, and I took that to be an encouraging sign. I had no idea where he was, but that didn’t matter: I took hold of the stuff of Shadow, gave it the slightest twist, and called to my hand an orange-breasted bird of my Desire. It was a robin, and it trilled sweetly as it landed in my palm.
“Lead me to Jack of Shadows,” I instructed.
The bird chirped once and took flight, and I followed.
The bird never left my sight, always waiting, allowing me to catch up when I fell behind. Police cars passed by me several times as I walked, and a PRT transport once. All around me was the press of humanity. People, so many people, and I just one face in that seemingly endless crowd. In time I left behind the skyscrapers of the city center. Now the buildings were smaller, and the smell of the ocean more noticable. Finally, almost an hour after I’d left the PRT headquarters, I walked up the hill two blocks away from Lord Street and found the robin I’d created out of Shadow waiting on the eaves of the Palanquin night club.
It was spring, and spring in Brockton Bay often had an ephemeral feel to it, an uncertainty that couldn’t quite settle itself between our usually mild winters and the hot summers that followed. It seemed like less a season in itself and more just a time of transition between one season and another. Only very rarely did it smooth out into that eternal blooming of which poets sang, but those moments were preserved in memory like a fly in amber: the fluttering uncertain excitement of a first kiss; the first pale green buds of leaves on winter-bare trees; the gold morning of that first day after the snow melts and you can go outside, and you’re alive, and the world seems limitless, and you run and splash in the puddles the snow left behind with the pure delight of a child who had been cooped up for too long. In that spring afternoon sunlight, the Palanquin looked almost ordinary.
It was muggy today, but only a little, and the neon signs and the colored lights that made the Palanquin so unlike anything else in the area were all but invisible in the afternoon sun. At night, the building looked like it had come from India by way of Las Vegas. By day, it was a wide three story brownstone building with a row of dogwood trees along the sidewalk out front. The trees were in bloom, each an alternating riot of white and pink flowers, each with lights set up at the base of the trunk to illuminate the leaves at night.
The club wasn’t open yet, and sixteen was way too young to be allowed inside, but that didn’t stop me. I decided that it was probable that the door was unlocked and exerted my will upon Shadow, and the door opened when I turned the handle and pulled, and my robin flew through the door as soon as it was open.
The main room was empty except for an unremarkable man mopping the dance floor and a slender red-haired woman cleaning the tables. The two workers exchanged looks when I came in, and the woman spoke up: “We’re closed, miss. We open at five. How did you even…” she trailed off when she took in my appearance. “Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m here to see Jack,” I told her.
The woman frowned, taking the measure of me, considering my costume and mask. After a moment she muttered, “Where’s the bloody doorman?”
There was a stairway to an upper level, and my robin was waiting on the railing at the top of the stairs. It tweeted noisily, drawing the eyes of the workers, at which point the red-haired woman turned and walked through a door marked ‘staff only’ likely to retrieve assistance in removing me from the club. The man just shook his head and went back to mopping the dance floor, occasionally returning the mop to his bucket and then wringing the water out of it.
I ascended the stairs and found him seated at a table near the far end of the upper level, near another door marked ‘staff only’, and he wasn’t alone: sitting to his right was a… man? Woman? I wasn’t sure. They were dressed in a peasant’s shirt and long trousers, both covered with many coloured patches, and a harlequin’s mask concealed their face. To Jack’s left was a bald and obese man with pale, translucent skin that showed a shadow of his skeleton and internal organs as well as numerous small, hardened spiral growths all over his body. Across from him sat a orange-skinned boy with blue hair dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. I recognized the group. I’d researched the parahumans of Brockton Bay: these were Circus, Gregor the Snail, and Newter.
They were playing cards.
“Twenty,” Gregor said, and the others each placed a pair of tokens in the middle of the table. Each of them had three face-up cards and one face-down card in front of them; the deck was sitting in front of Circus. Of the group, Gregor had the most poker chips in front of him, followed by Jack, Circus, and then Newter.
“Twenty?” Shadowjack asked. “That sounds like the bet of a man unsure of his hand. Here’s your twenty and a hundred more.” He placed a number of tokens in the center of the board. I had no context for the game: I’d never played poker and didn’t know the rules, so whatever was going on was all Greek to me, but they seemed invested in it, so I waited.
“Fuck,” Newter swore. “I can’t afford to lose that much. I won’t have anything for tonight.”
Gregor regarded Jack impassively. “One hundred more,” he said, and matched the bet.
“A hundred more,” Circus echoed, and their voice didn’t offer any help in discerning their gender. There was the sound of poker chips on poker chips.
“Don’t let this braggart chase you out of the game,” Gregor said. “He’s bluffing.”
“Easy for you to say,” Newter said. “You can afford another loss. He cleaned me out last game. I fold.”
Circus dealt another card to each of them who were still in the game. “Well,” they said, “Jack could still be working that Flush. A deuce for the dealer. Queen of hearts for Gregor.”
“Hello, Felicia,” Shadowjack said, not looking up at me. My bird settled onto his shoulder, tweeted twice, and then flew away through an open window across the room.
“Jack,” I said. "Making friends?"
The others at the table gave me considering looks.
"Poker's not a game you play to make friends," Circus said with a wink. "More… cordial enemies."
"Ah," I said. I took note of their body language, saw how they were leaning towards Jack, how they occasionally made what seemed like incidental physical contact with him but not with the others. "Making cordial enemies, then?" I asked.
"Several," Jack replied, and there was a flash of white within a momentary smile. "Felicia, this is Circus, Newter, and Gregor. Cordial enemies, this is Felicia: my student."
The expressions of the three parahumans went from 'considering' to 'wary'. Gregor nodded at me. Newter never made it past 'wary'. Circus smiled. "Charmed," they said.
"I didn't realize you were a teacher," Gregor said.
"I am a man of many talents," Jack replied. "But we're getting off track. We have a game to finish."
Each of them returned their attention to the cards. Silence for a trio of heartbeats. Circus put down two tokens. "Twenty," they said, and for a moment, I was sure they were a man. Doubt crept in soon after, and I told myself to stop wondering about it.
One hundred more," Gregor said, matching Jack's earlier tone exactly.
"One hundred more," Jack said.
"Too rich for me," Circus said.
Gregor examined his face-down card, then looked up at Jack. "Let's see them," he said.
Jack revealed his hidden card. "Flush," he said.
Gregor smiled thinly, then revealed his hidden card. "Full house," he said.
Circus and Newter let out the breath they were each holding.
Jack grinned. "Well played," he said.
Gregor began to collect the pile of poker chips from the center of the table. "Can't win them all, Jack," he said with satisfaction.
"Best of five?" Jack proposed.
"Thank you, no."
And the game was over. Each collected what chips remained to them. The chips were exchanged for cash, and then Jack beckoned me over to a table in the corner away from the others.
"That trick with the bird," Jack said in a low voice. "It was clever. Can you do that with any bird, or did you make that one yourself?"
"I made it," I said. "Or called it? I wanted to find you. The bird was how my Desire-walk manifested."
"Ah," Jack said. "And now that you have?"
"I want to free all the people trapped by Bakuda's time bombs," I said.
“Then do it,” Jack said. ”I'm sure you know how."
“It took hours to unravel just one bubble," I said.
"There has to be a better way. Some way to free them all at once."
“There are other ways, not necessarily better ones.”
"There has to be a better way. Some way to free them all at once."
I let out a frustrated breath. "If I have to free them all the way I did today, it will take forever."
"The project of a few weeks," he countered. "Perhaps a month."
"I can't take weeks to do this."
He met my gaze levelly. "Child of Amber.
Here in Shadow your blood has the power to reshape the universe. You can unmake your enemies, move the stars, render anything and anyone into something more to your liking, you can reorder time itself. Even without reordering time, you literally have all the time in the world to accomplish your goals. And your complaint is that the use of that power takes too long?"
I shook my head, my thoughts touching on what he was suggesting and then skittering away. "I don't know how to do those things yet," I insisted.
"If it's a matter of experience, find some Shadow where time flows like a lightning strike. Spend a few thousand years growing in power and mastery, then return a few minutes later and do what thou wilt."
I thought about it. This time, my thoughts landed on what he was suggesting and did not wriggle free. I saw myself with hundreds of years, thousands of years between one moment and the next. Tens of thousands. A woman was waiting there on the other side: she looked like me, but I didn't know her. I wanted to tell Jack, "Get behind me, Satan," but that was a ridiculous, mad notion: I knew the Morning Star, and he wasn't Jack of Shadows.
I stood upon the precipice, and all around me lay the abyss.
"I..." I turned to him, then, and I was seized with a sudden urgency as I said, “You could do it, couldn’t you? You could rescue everyone from those time-stop zones.”
“Why would I want to?” he asked. “They’ll be freed on their own sooner or later.”
I looked at him. “The one I freed Vista from wouldn’t have broken down on its own for a thousand years,” I said.
“Sooner or later,” he repeated with a careless shrug.
“Everyone she’d ever known would have been dead, Jack.”
“Won’t the same thing be true in a little while now that you’ve freed her?” Jack asked.
I had no idea how to answer that. His perspective seemed inhuman. The abyss yawned before me, and I shied away from it. “But it isn’t true now.”
“You’re still thinking like a mortal,” Jack observed. “Time will cure that, sooner or later.”
I shook my head. I wanted to deny his statement. I needed to deny it. But I couldn’t find the words.
“This is what happens when you live with mortals,” Jack said, and there was a strange timbre in his voice. “This is why your kind is never satisfied with Shadows in the long term. Shadows die. Amber endures.”
Neither of us said anything for a long moment.
“I knew a girl, once, on the One-Half-World. Rosalie. I met her at the Sign of the Burning Pestle, on the coach road near the ocean in the Twilight lands. She was young and beautiful, and I wanted her.” His gaze lingered on Circus across the way for a moment, then went back to me. “Her teeth were white, and they flashed when she smiled. Her hair was long, glossy, and dark as the empty places between the stars. Her eyes were like the dayside sky. Blue. So blue.” His voice was a murmur now. Not a whisper, but a soft rumble in his chest. “I wanted her, so I had her, and she had me. I spoke words to capture her heart, and she loved me.” He smiled in remembrance. “When I left, I promised I would come back for her one day and take her to dwell with me in Shadow Guard, my castle that no man has ever set eyes upon.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I went back for her after a little while, and she was gone,” he said. “No one even remembered Rosalie. Everything was changed. All the people were different. I went away again.” There was a heavy silence, and then he smiled, and his dark mood lifted. “It has been some time since your last magical lesson, hasn’t it? Why don’t you show me what you’ve learned since then. After, perhaps we will speak of better ways to steal little lives away from pockets of frozen time.”
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Jack's style of magic was very different from mine. In terms of power, none of his spells could hold a candle to mine, but his magic was more flexible. He didn't prepare spells in advance; he could complete magical operations that would take me minutes in seconds. None of what he did with it was more impressive than the toolkit of an above-average grab-bag cape, but it seemed useful and flexible enough that I asked him to teach me that and not the style Aunt Fionna wanted me to learn. He laughed in my face, of course. His innate power -- the power that made him a Lord on the Darkside of his world -- was a lot more impressive.
I hadn't worked out all the details and he wasn't inclined to explain it, but as near as I could tell, he had power over shadows, or in shadows. Literally. He was always dangerous, but near or where an object interrupted light's path he went from 'above average grab-bag' to utter nightmare. Not for the first time, I worried what he was up to when he wasn't teaching me. Not for the first time, he didn't answer when I asked.
Given the differences in our magical styles, I'd been surprised he had anything to teach me at all, but enough of the principles of working magical forces carried over between our styles to make the enterprise worthwhile.
We talked and worked there until the club opened almost two hours later. I didn't mention that the Swarm Escape spell he had helped me to devise would have resulted in my death had I used it against Lung, but I was pretty sure that he knew that I knew. I didn't know if he'd meant it as a joke, a prank, a test, or if he'd actually wanted me to die, but there wasn't any gain to be had in confronting him about it here and now.
But I would remember, and I would not easily trust him again.
Before we were done, I had three new spells prepared and suspended on the image of the Pattern: one attack, one defense, one escape. The first attempt was done with his help; then Jack made me unravel them and do it again unaided.
At five, the doors to the Palanquin unlocked, and people began to file in. Gregor relocated to one of the private rooms; Circus took a seat beside Jack; Newter disappeared for half an hour before returning clean and dressed in a pair of nice slacks and a black mesh shirt that showed off his abs. And pecs. And biceps.
The guy was hot, okay? And my age. He was just also orange with lizard eyes and a prehensile tail. He saw me looking, made a show of looking me up and down, and then gave a thumbs up and a wink.
I looked away, cheeks burning.
“So,” Circus said. “Case 53s do it for you, huh?”
I glared at them, and their grin only widened. “Shut up,” I said.
“I’m not kink-shaming,” Circus said. “I think it’s a good thing. Everyone needs someone, right?”
I wanted to explain that it could never, ever happen. I mean, I’d done my research on Newter when I had been examining all the publicly available information on parahumans in Brockton Bay. Granted, information had been scarce since Faultline’s crew weren’t the types of villain to appear in the papers or on TV, and the concrete details that were out there had been hard to pick apart from the speculation. What I did know was that his bodily fluids were potent hallucinogens. Even the sweat that accumulated on his skin was apparently enough to send someone off to la-la land, taking only a few seconds for it to be absorbed through the skin.
My trip to Wonderland -- or more accurately, Alec’s subsequent explanation, once I was lucid again after being exposed to that hallucinogenic pollen -- had already taught me exactly what happens when an Amberite is exposed to a hallucinogen. As it turns out, the ability to shape Shadow however you please does not mix well with hallucination. So if I wanted to tear down the walls of reality and go spinning into a literal place of madness and horror beyond time and space and likely take everyone nearby with me when I did, shaking Newter’s hand would be a great way to get it done.
I did not explain this to Circus. My worse if wiser self told me that admitting to such a weakness would be a very bad idea. The rest of me congratulated my worse if wiser self for stating the obvious.
Then the conversation turned to more productive matters. Club-goers gathered as we talked, listening as Jack and I went over the finer points of the manipulation of pockets of frozen time. Jack came at it from the perspective of a thief; my previous effort had been the effort of an engineer. The difference in mentality led to an interesting extended discussion of the possible means for freeing those trapped. It gave me ideas.
And then, in the middle of our conversation, I felt it: a gentle and questing pressure against the edges of my thoughts.
I frowned. "Do you feel that?" I asked suddenly.
"Feel what?" Jack asked.
The pressure grew, and my adrenaline spiked. I looked about for a possible source, my eyes wide, my hand straying to the gun holstered at my hip.
All at once, a wavering image seemed to form in the air before me, suspended in a cloud of rainbow light, but no one other than me seemed to see it. The image waxed in time to the increasing psychic pressure, and then it coalesced into Alec, sitting on a couch in some faraway room, giving me a very annoyed look. "Hey dork," he said.
"Uh..." And still, no one else reacted to it. Some had drawn back from me out of concern for what I might do in my distress, but no one else saw Alec. "Alec?" I asked.
"Yeah," he answered. "Tats made me do a Trump of you. I suck at Trumps even worse than you do, and it took for fucking ever."
This... was what Trump contact was like from the other side? It only then occurred to me that I'd always been the sender before now. "Sorry?" I made the word sound more like a question than an apology.
My not-quite apology did not improve his mood. "Tattletale needs you," he said. "You want to come through the Trump, or are you gonna take the long way?"
I looked to Jack. "I might need to go," I told him.
He exchanged looks with Circus. "Then go," he said.
Alec's image held out a hand toward me.
I took his hand, found it solid, and stepped forward into a well-furnished room in Lisa's underground base, leaving the people in the Palanquin to grasp at a fading rainbow.
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"What's the emergency?" I asked as I stepped out of the rainbow shimmer and into what looked a lot like a nicer version of the living room in the now destroyed Undersiders lair.
I took in my surroundings. It was larger than the old place. All the furniture was new, and there were no windows. Alec stood before me; he held a drawing of me in one hand, and as I glanced about he released my hand that he had clasped with his other.
The paper he had made my Trump from was crumbling in his hand. "Fuck," he hissed, and dropped it as if he had been burned, but when it hit the floor is made a sound like cracking ice, and a pattern of frost spread out beneath its crumbling pieces. "I told you I suck at these," he said over his shoulder.
I'm pretty sure I heard someone answer him, and from only a few feet away, but I didn't see anyone. I scanned the room, noted Lisa coming in through the door on the far side and Brian following her, but I didn't see the... what was I doing again?
"Thanks, Alec," Lisa said. Alec settled back down onto the couch.
"What's the emergency?" I asked again.
Lisa side-eyed Alec. "Really?"
"What?" he asked. "You wanted her here. I got her here."
I glared at Alec, though I was more annoyed than angry. "There wasn't an emergency." I surmised.
"I needed you here, but not an emergency," Lisa confirmed.
"Okay," I said, and waited expectantly.
"Has anyone seen..." Brian started to say.
Aisha was suddenly sitting in Alec's lap on the couch. "The Travelers want to go home or something," she said airily.
Brian's face went stony. "Aisha, please get up," he said.
She looked his way. "It's cute that you're looking out for me, Brian, but I'm not your sister. My brother is some other Brian Laborn." A sly smirk played across her features. "As far as you know. You know that, right?"
"The Travelers?" I asked.
"I know," Brian said. "Like I said, I know how he must feel with you missing. For all he knows, you could be dead. I owe it to him to watch out for you. And I know I can't stop you from doing whatever you want, but as a favor to me, can you please not sit in Alec's lap in front of me? You don't know where he's been."
Lisa nodded. "Not all of them. Sundancer wants to go home. The rest are sending messages to their families."
"Fuck you, too," Alec said lazily.
Aisha and Brian stared at each other as if having an invisible battle of wills, and it seemed as though neither would let the other have their way.
"Okay," I said. "Aisha, do you want me to take you home?"
My words shattered the tension that was building between her and Brian, and each looked away.
"... yeah," Aisha said, and her voice was thick. "I guess I should at least check in with Brian. My Brian. And... I didn't actually mean to get stuck in some other universe, I just... got a little carried away, I guess."
"I'll take her," Alec said.
"Thank you," Brian said.
"Whatever," Alec and Aisha said simultaneously, and in exactly the same tone. Then they exchanged looks and smiled.
I half expected the other Aisha -- the one from this universe -- to protest, maybe to argue that they didn't know what would happen when Imp went home, that she didn't want to lose her powers. But if she was there at all, she didn't make herself known.
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"Thank you doesn't seem like it's enough," the girl said, and her eyes shimmered with unshed tears. "But thank you. You don't know what this means to me, and I could spend the rest of my life explaining it and still not do it justice." She had the sort of beauty that was everything I'd seen myself as the opposite of since the first day I'd ever compared myself to another girl and felt I came up short, and her well-kept blonde hair and wide cyan eyes only made it worse. She didn't look like the deadliest Blaster in Brockton Bay: she looked like some spoiled rich girl: a competitor in an economy of attention, and a superior one, possessing every gift in full measure which in myself was lacking. And even as I judged her for her appearance, she spoke those words of gratitude, and pinpricks of guilt and shame shattered the armor of my contempt.
It is a strange and uncomfortable thing to suddenly recognize the existence of another person as equal to but separate from your own: to see a subject in what you thought to be an object. There was an almost perverse sense of my own diminishment in that recognition, and I looked away, uncomfortable with the unexpected feeling of vulnerability. "You aren't home yet," I deflected.
She smiled. "No. But I'm on my way, and that's more than I ever thought I'd be able to say."
We began to walk. I wore my costume, but she wasn't wearing hers. "I'm Marissa, by the way," she said. "You don't have to tell me your real name. I just wanted you to know mine."
I made myself smile, felt guilty again, and studied the photos of Earth Aleph's Madison, Wisconsin, that I'd been provided.
As we crossed the intersection of Lord and Palmer, I made the first shift, subtracting the brackish smell of the docks for something more earthy: in the Shadow we had just crossed into, the oceans had an order of magnitude less salt. Then we turned a corner, and the buildings on the other side were cleaner and better maintained. Architectural styles began to shift, old townhouses and apartment buildings and warehouses giving way to something more like the photographs.
"Do you have family, Felicia?" Marissa asked.
My mouth felt uncomfortably dry, so I swallowed. Then I swallowed again. "Yeah," I said at last. A distant and familiar sadness hung on the wind, and before I'd even realized it, our surroundings shifted several times, taking on elements that would, if pursued, lead me home. I found myself wondering how Dad was doing. The guilt came stronger now. "I haven't seen them in a while," I said.
"I know how that feels" Marissa said.
I shifted the universe back towards Earth Aleph and away from my house.
"It's funny how life is," she went on. "When I was back home, all I wanted was to get away from my Mom. Now that I'm away, all I want is to go back. I know I won't be able to stand her when I get there, and I know we'll just end up fighting, but..."
Almost despite myself, I smiled, and the bittersweet notes of distant and happier days seemed to drift on the breeze. "What's she like? Your mom, I mean."
Marissa thought about it. "Smart. Type-A. A little cold and a little overbearing, but she always meant well. Practical. Formidable. She's the kind of woman who could walk into a store that had signs posted saying, 'No discounts, don't even ask,' ask for a discount, and get it." She smiled at the memory. "God she could be such a pain in the ass."
I felt increasingly uncomfortable. "If she's that bad, why go back?"
"She's my mom," Marissa said, as if that explained everything. And maybe it did.
"But," I said, "if you're just going to fight again..."
She looked at me, then, and she saw more than I meant to show. "Felicia? Is everything okay for you at home?"
Something in me wanted to open up. Marissa was basically a stranger. That made it easier. I could tell her everything, unburden myself, vent until it all ran dry and maybe feel a little better on the other side.
I didn't.
I was reminded of a joke I'd heard once: Two men walk into a bar. The first man orders a scotch and soda. The second man remembers something he'd forgotten, and it doubles him over with pain. He falls to the floor shaking and then through the floor into the earth. He looks back up at the first man, but he doesn't call out to him. They're not that close.
We walked on in uncomfortable silence, and she let the matter drop.
Shadow moved around us in time to my will. Here a freshly painted mailbox. There the distinctive dome of Madison's capitol building. A creek to our left grew into a river and then widened more and more and more even as the bay crept inward and lakeshore took shape past where the Rig had floated. And then we were there. We settled into Earth Aleph, now in Madison instead of Brockton Bay, standing on the sidewalk outside of an apartment building in one of those neighborhoods that was more than halfway gentrified but hadn't finished the process yet.
Thus came the girl who didn't want to think about family or home to the home of the girl who did.
I saw Marissa to the door of her mom's apartment, but I turned away before she could knock. She hugged me before she let me go.
With the sound of her joyful reunion behind me, I stepped into Shadow and made my way back to Brockton Bay. Resolve grew within me as I walked. I thought of Newter and Gregor, case 53s with no memory before waking up with their powers, no idea who they were or where they came from, no idea if they even had family who missed them. I thought of Aisha and Brian. I thought of Marissa and her mom. I thought of Vista and of all the people still trapped in bubbles of stagnant time. I thought of Jack and his insistence that this -- all of this -- was so very temporary, and I had better get used to the idea.
In time my footsteps echoed down familiar streets, my hope and my despair mingling strangely with nostalgia as I saw the place where I had fallen off my bike so many times as Mom and Dad taught me how to ride without the training wheels. I remembered skinned knees and fingers pricked raw from picking blackberries in the park. How many hours had I spent stealing sweetness from that harsh, prickly, unyielding thing?
I remembered Dad's face after the funeral, after all the well-wishers had gone home, when he'd looked like a corpse and not a living man, and it had been almost worse than the funeral. It had been closed-casket, so I hadn't even gotten to see her body one more time before it had sunk down into the ground.
I remembered the sick, dull plop of the rose I had dropped into the grave at the end of the service. I remembered the equally sick plop of the first shovel-full of Earth falling onto the wooden coffin.
I was here, now, at the house. It loomed in front of me with an unreal quality as if at any moment I would wake and discover that everything since I'd woken up in the hospital after Lung burned me had been a dream.
I skipped over the rotten middle step.
I drew back my hand, hesitated, gathered my will, knocked on the door.
The handle turned. The door swung open.
Dad was there. We stared at each other for a moment, neither knowing what to say. From somewhere in the house a woman's voice called out, "Daniel? Who is it?"
And then a change came over his face: a look of wonder mixed with fragile hope. "Taylor?"
"Hi, Dad," I whispered in reply.