did she say?” the deputy asked, and the sheriff scowled, but let the question stand.
“She said that in a year, if I had taken proper care of the changeling and still wanted my daughter back, Elizabeth would be returned to me.”
“This woman in the mirror?” The sheriff’s skepticism was fading beneath undeniable curiosity. “Did you get her name? Her species?”
“She wouldn’t tell me any of that. But she looked and sounded as human as Delilah did.”
“So what did you do?” Pennington said, and from across the table, Charity could see that though he held a pen, the notebook page in front of him was completely blank.
“We cared for Lilah as if she were our own. She was a delightful child. Happy and affectionate. We came to love her—I felt guilty for how much I loved her, when my own daughter was missing.” Charity folded her hands on the table and took a deep breath. “Then the one-year mark came and went, and Elizabeth never reappeared.”
“Did you try the blood-on-the-mirror trick again?” the sheriff asked.
Charity nodded. “Several times, but my summons went unanswered.”
“And you never got her back?” the deputy guessed, clearly transfixed by the story.
Pennington waved one hand to silence the deputy, and when he turned back to Charity, she met his gaze with tear-filled eyes. “No, I never got Elizabeth back,” she said. Then she took a deep breath and gave voice to a fear that had lived in her soul for twenty-five years, but had never before been spoken aloud.
“Sheriff, I think my Elizabeth was never returned because I loved Delilah more.”
The weight of my mother’s confession steadily pressed the air from my lungs until psychological suffocation felt like a very real threat. I tried to lean forward, staring intently through the one-way glass into the room where she sat, but again chains and cuffs held me painfully short of where I wanted to be.
However, the real trauma went much, much deeper. Brandon had been wrong—there really was a Delilah Marlow. But I wasn’t her.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to take it all in. Trying to understand.
I wasn’t my mother’s daughter.
That devastating revelation triggered a landslide of loss, leaving me crushed by the debris of my own life. I had no real name or family. No birthplace or birth date. No true identity. Added to the confiscation of everything I’d ever owned, that left me with nothing but a body I could no longer trust. Though according to Pennington, that was now owned by the state of Oklahoma.
This can’t be real.
What was I, if I had no name, no friends, no family, no job, no home, no belongings, and no authority over my own body? What could I be?
Maybe I was just the good little girl my mother’d begged for. Or maybe I was the monster Sheriff Pennington believed me to be. Maybe I was the first enemy soldier in a secret war against humanity. But could that even be true, if I didn’t know about it?
A strange creak cut through my thoughts, and Deputy Atherton turned away from the window to look at me. “Delilah? Are you okay?”
When I opened my mouth to tell him just how far from okay I was, the creaking stopped. I’d been clenching my jaw so tightly we could both hear the stress.
“You really didn’t know about any of that?” he said, pointing beyond the glass at my mother.
I shook my head. Even after hearing it, I wasn’t sure I truly understood. All I knew for sure was that I was a changeling of unknown origin sent to torture my mother. And that somehow a punishment meant to last a year had lasted a lifetime. For what? For loving me too much?
That wasn’t fair to her. She was a good mother. Yet if whoever’d taken Elizabeth Delilah Marlow—the real Lilah—had brought her back, where would that have left me? Would I have been raised by the woman in the mirror? Was she my mother?
No.
Charity Marlow had been living with her secret for twenty-five years, maintaining her silence to protect me, mourning her real daughter—a baby who’d looked just like me—in private, because the world could not know of her loss. That made her my mother, even if we shared no blood.
Had my dad known?
Yes.
Suddenly my father’s periodic melancholy made sense. What had he seen when he’d looked at me? Could he see the difference between me and his Elizabeth? Had he loved me as much as my mother did?
Had he blamed her for the loss of their true child? Had he blamed me?
“If you tell the sheriff I let you watch, he’ll have my badge.”
Deputy Atherton’s statement sliced through my thoughts so suddenly that it took me a second to understand what he’d said.
I sniffed, unable to wipe either my eyes or my dripping nose. “I won’t tell him.” As the only person to show me even the slightest bit of compassion, Atherton was the closest thing I had to an ally. “Thank you for letting me see my mom. What’s going to happen to her?” I whispered, still staring through the glass.
He shrugged. “If she’s human, she should be fine.”
“She harbored a cryptid for twenty-five years. That’s a felony, Deputy.”
“She was protecting her kid. The sheriff would never...” Atherton didn’t bother to finish. We both knew the sheriff would.
“Mrs. Marlow,” Pennington continued from the next room. “As an officer of the law, I have to ask, why didn’t you turn the changeling over to the proper authorities when it became clear that your daughter was never going to be returned?”
The changeling. He wasn’t even using my name anymore. I’d become a thing.
“She didn’t know she wasn’t human,” my mother said. “I didn’t know for sure. If I’d given her to the police, they would have put her in the state refuge, where she’d have been less than a snack for the first troll or ogre to find her. She was a baby, Sheriff.”
“Yes, and I’m sure she was adorable.” Pennington leaned back in his chair again, and though I couldn’t see his face, I could picture his patronizing expression perfectly. “A few years ago I saw a baby tiger in the zoo, over at Tulsa. It was behind a thick wall of glass playin’ with its handler, chasin’ a bit of string with a stuffed mouse tied at the end. That baby tiger was the cutest damn thing I ever saw in my life.” He paused dramatically. “A year and a half later it ripped that same handler’s arm off and bit through her jugular.”
My mother didn’t even flinch. “You’re suggesting Lilah is like this tiger?”
“I’m tellin’
