6

YOU KNOW WHERE THIS IS going.

When I still lived in the orphanage, after Helin’s death, I would spend hours at a window. One might have wondered what could keep my attention, since the view was only the brick of an opposing wall. I was looking not at the view but at my reflection. I pretended the girl I saw there was someone else. A friend. A sister. A High-Kith girl whose life I could only imagine, with silk slippers and pet foxes taken from the pink beaches and tamed, leashed with ribbons. Who could stack a castle of sugar cubes. Who slept in late. Who lived so tenderly it was as though she were housed inside a flower. This girl was afraid of nothing.

Sometimes the reflection seemed real.

I would grow frightened and stay away from the windows, from any mirrorlike surface, from spoons, from still water in a sink.

And then, though you would think I had learned better, after what had happened to Helin, I would return to the window. The girl in the glass would smile.

The wind whipped the edge of my coat as I walked home from Aden’s. My mouth still tasted like his mouth. Things had gone too far.

I was the one who allowed that to happen.

And I was the one who thought, This will always be my life: kissing someone I don’t love. Living in a city I will never leave.

And I was the one who saw the crimson bird perched at a gutter’s edge.

But it wasn’t me who stopped, sandy dirt scraping against the pavement under my sandals. It wasn’t me who glanced around and saw—strangely, impossibly—no one. It wasn’t me who felt a need grow inside my chest like a fruit and split its rind.

Nor was it me who set my hands and feet onto the metal struts that bound the gutter pipe to the building’s wall. I didn’t begin to climb.

It was the girl in the window’s reflection.

So brave.

So foolish.