January
Lucy's Age: 7
Lucy is officially one year older. I considered making a pilgrimage up to Yonkers for the occasion, but instead opted to simply send a present and a note expressing my excitement on her behalf.
Renworst was only marginally helpful when it came to picking out a present. From all indications he is very diligent when it comes to making sure that Lucy is fed, clothed and makes it to bed on time, but he doesn't seem to have any real sense of Lucy's interests.
After realizing that this is likely the main contributor to Lucy's ongoing unhappiness, I've ordered Renworst to spend more time with Lucy, to interact with her, to go have fun. I must admit to a certain degree of frustration. With Mrs. Agosti my problems all revolved around the fact that she wanted to do too much with Lucy and she wasn't loyal enough to me personally. Now I've gone to the other end of the extreme with Renworst who is fully loyal to me, but who doesn't actually care about Lucy at all.
In some ways that is good as it should mean that Lucy will readily bond with me again once I have a bit more time and can continue spending time with her, but I do spare the idle moment or two each day wondering about the long-term impacts the situation will have on Lucy's psyche. Unfortunately I can see no other way to move forward. Renworst is no Mrs. Agosti, but he will have to do for now.
I had hoped to be done with Mrs. Agosti entirely. In a world that was in any way sensible I would be. Unfortunately I ended up with a few spare minutes on my hands last week and I picked up the journal that I'd seized from Mrs. Agosti and started to peruse it.
There is an amazing amount of overly sentimental garbage all throughout her entries, but if I'd needed another bit of evidence as to the fact that she loved Lucy then the journal would have proved it. I honestly can't say what compelled me to read through four years of entries, but I found myself starting from the beginning of the journal with entries that predated our association and then reading on through to the last few entries that she wrote while locked inside a cage in my safe house.
Maybe it was the same curiosity that causes a voyeur to watch someone night after night, vicariously living the life of whomever it is that he's spying on. I'd been inside of Mrs. Agosti's mind, so one could be excused for thinking that there wouldn't be anything in the journal that could surprise me, but reading someone's mind is never that simple.
I can access facts and feelings, discrete packets of information, but it is incredibly difficult to form a coherent narrative from something like that. This, however, was a perfect picture of Mrs. Agosti's life and for the two days that it took me to read through it I felt an almost godlike omniscience.
I got to see Lucy, and even to a limited extent myself, through another set of eyes. There wasn't anything earthshattering there. No, instead I was struck by the black depression that had been consuming Mrs. Agosti in the weeks just before I offered her a job.
In my conditioning sessions I'd always focused on the present, or at least recent events, and I'd always been most concerned with Mrs. Agosti's underlying character rather than the emotions that might come and go over time.
I'd correctly understood that she was at her core a simple, happy woman, but I'd never understood just how bitterly she'd regretted never being able to have a child of her own. The journal alludes to at least one failed marriage early on, but is silent about the incident after she became Lucy's nanny.
The middle of the journal was full of the minutiae of childcare interspersed with milestones in Lucy's life, most of which I hadn't been around for, and then the end became once again interesting. Mrs. Agosti hadn't expected to live, not after I took Lucy away from her and locked her up. She'd expected, even wanted, me to kill her.
She'd gladly spent years tending to Lucy, loving Lucy, only to have the object of her feelings ripped away from her and the loss had been made all the more acute by the way that her memories of the time were becoming unreliable.
As I closed her journal and sat back to think about what I'd read, some of the reports from the investigator following Mrs. Agosti took on a new light. She didn't know what she'd lost, but the more I thought about it, the more confident I became that she was in many ways right back where she'd been four years ago. Only now she no doubt had a persistent feeling that the world was somehow wrong, that something more important than she could describe was missing.
I once again find myself in a quandary. Lucy loves Mrs. Agosti, much, much more than she loves me. Would my alleviating Mrs. Agosti's suffering be a marker that I could call in at some future date if Lucy were ever to become unwilling to do something I needed done? Is there even any way to call in such a marker without risking a reunion between Lucy and Mrs. Agosti?