By the time Rebecca came back, Momo’s entire hand was cramping.

  She’d been so engrossed in her sketching that she had left her body behind completely, the pain only coming to the forefront when a plate of freshly seared grilled cheese sandwiches were dumped right in front of her, accompanied by two steaming hot bowls of tomato soup.

  “Oh! Honey.” Rebecca’s voice was like a swan. She placed both hands around Momo’s shoulders and squeezed. “These are… these are spectacular.”

  The praise warmed the back of Momo’s neck, but spectacular wasn’t the word she’d choose.

  It’d been an hour—and she hadn’t managed to infuse a single speck of mana into the pages.

  Her error, she later diagnosed, had been her usual achilles heel: Thinking Too Hard About It.

  It started with a foolish assumption. Seeing as she was a god now, Momo had figured she should be able to produce an illustration on par with the stuff she’d seen in Alois.

  Wrong.

  Okay, not completely wrong. She could absolutely achieve it technically. Her strokes were near-perfect. Her sense for anatomy and perspective were first-class. She could visualize any scene from any perspective and put it to the page.

  Hell, she was creating Rembrandt-level stuff on Rebecca’s printer paper with a crayon.

  It was just that the more detail she poured into the drawings, the more her perfectionism flared like a particularly bad case of hives. Her eyes and brain looped obsessively over poorly drawn shadows, facial features that were off by a centimeter.

  The more technically perfect the drawing, the more she found fault in it.

  And the more she found fault in it, the more her mana refused to enter the page—the magical substance sprang off the paper as if repulsed, dousing back onto her face.

  But, to her dismay, the same effect happened when she tried drawing stick figures. They were a lot easier to draw, sure, and there was less to critique, but she was finding it impossible to convey the meaning she wanted to with such few lines. How could she distill what it meant to purify a creature with a few strokes and googly eyes?

  “Thanks,” Momo said to Rebecca, setting down her work with a defeated sigh. “But I’m not having much luck in the spellbook department.”

  Rebecca smiled warmly at her.

  “That’s alright, dear. Learning things takes time. Learning to teach takes even longer,” she said with a breathless laugh as she flopped into her armchair.

  Her face was lightly pink from the kitchen, her hair even more tousled than before. It was terribly endearing.

  “But really,” Rebecca continued, picking up one of Momo’s Picasso-like renditions of the Bone Dance spell Devora had taught her. “You’ve got talent coming out the wazoo. Have you considered going to school for art?”

  The sliding door by the kitchen clicked shut. Two canine mongrels pitter-pattered in, a heavily-panting Mallmart close behind them. Momo wasn’t sure who had tired who out.

  Momo reached down to grab one of the grilled cheeses before the dogs—or more likely, the younger Momo—devoured them in one bite.

  “I actually did,” she confessed. “But I never graduated.”

  Rebecca’s eyes widened with interest. “Oh, yeah? Why not?”

  Momo nearly choked on her sandwich.

  Hm. I don’t know. Because I died and was resurrected by a crazy she-devil who I fell a little in love with?

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  “Couldn’t keep my grades up.”

  “Ah.” Rebecca got a far-off look in her eyes. “Same thing happened to me, actually.”

  Momo hadn’t expected that. “Really?”

  “Really. I dropped out in my last year. Grades were in the dumps. Self worth went down the drain. Spent all my savings on a 2-month Buddhist retreat in the Himalayas…”

  Rebecca snorted to herself.

  “That’s where I met my husband, actually. Ex. Ex-husband. He convinced me to go back to school. Three years later, I have a stable job, kids… a whole life. Isn’t that embarrassing?”

  Momo’s eyebrows furrowed.

  “Why would that be embarrassing?’

  Rebecca tilted her head, then shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I just…” She sighed, and scooped one of the eager chihuahuas from the floor into her lap. It began to gnaw noisily on her acrylics. “I feel like when people tell these inspiring stories about how they got their life back on track, it always begins with like—I hit this extreme low, and then I decided enough is enough, so I’m going to pull myself out of this ditch, and figure it out! Because they have this deep intrinsic motivation to live, or whatever.”

  She laughed again.

  “But that wasn’t me. I didn’t decide to pull myself out of any ditch. I was very happy to sit there. I didn’t build my self worth back up. Marcus did. He forced me to give myself a second chance. I don’t think I ever would, if he hadn’t made me. And so that’s why… that’s why it’s embarrassing. I didn’t drag myself out. I got dragged out.”

  She took a long breath in.

  “And now I think I’m waiting for someone to do the same thing again.”

  She looked back at the fridge, toward the photo of her two kids, and sighed.

  Momo felt a painful pang of recognition inside of her.

  One that made her shoot up from her seat like a railgun.

  “That’s not embarrassing, Ms. Bloomsey.”

  Rebecca looked up, surprised. Even her dog stopped chewing on her for a moment.

  “I appreciate it, dear, but—”

  “I don’t think we’re ever meant to save ourselves alone.”

  Momo wasn’t sure why she said it. She wasn’t even sure she meant it until after it had come out of her lips. The words just lingered there as Mallmart ran the shower; as the dogs got bored and started slurping out of their water bowls.

  But Momo did mean it, she decided—shaking her head once affirmatively.

  “So. Why don’t you tell me what’s up with Jonathan and Jared,” she said. “And then after that, you can teach me how to do…” She gestured at the mountain of paper. “This?”

  Rebecca bit down on her lip, took a moment to consider it, then smiled up at her.

  “Alright, dear. Deal.”

  ***

  “So.” Momo took a sharp breath in. “To bottomline it…”

  She raised her eyebrow expectantly at Rebecca.

  Rebecca complied. “I haven’t seen my kids in months.”

  Momo nodded. “Because…”

  “Because Marcus decided to take them to Nevada, even though we have split-custody, and I didn’t have the backbone to tell him no, because I didn’t…”

  “Think you were a good enough mother. Thought they’d be better with him. Without you.”

  Rebecca’s knees were drawn up high to her chest now.

  Between them, she mumbled, quietly, “Yes.”

  Momo pushed the empty plates and bowls aside, and put her hand on Rebecca’s knee.

  “A not-good enough mother wouldn’t be thinking about them twenty-four seven, would she?”

  Before Rebecca could get another word in, Momo shook her head.

  “The answer is no. She wouldn’t.”

  Momo picked up one of the spellbooks Rebecca had created. Like all the others, they featured stick figures. Figures she now saw as the two little boys they were.

  Two little boys going on adventures.

  It clicked for Momo then.

  “These weren’t meant for your students, were they?”

  Rebecca laughed wetly.

  “No. Of course not.”

  ***

  Love had created Rebecca’s spellbooks. Love for teaching, and love for her children.

  It was painfully obvious in retrospect.

  To create a spellbook–to make an artifact so powerful that it can pass a spell along from one person to the next—is an act of extreme compassion.

  And it made Momo start to wonder about something.

  About Sera, specifically. About Sera and her mountain of skill books.

  What did her cold heart adore so much, Momo wondered, to the point of invention?

  She’d probably never find out.

  She probably wouldn’t want to.

  ***

  “If it’s about love,” Mallmart asked, tapping her chin. “Then who are you drawing?”

  “Well wouldn’t you want to know.”

  “I thought that was obvious.”

  “Stop crowding me on the couch. There’s a perfectly nice chair over there.”

  Mallmart groaned, getting off the couch and falling into Rebecca’s armchair. The older woman was in her bedroom, the door shut. Momo could hear the soft echoes of her voice through the door. She was on a phone call with Marcus. It had started loud, a screaming match—then dulled to a quiet murmuring.

  Mallmart pointed to the page on Momo’s lap, which featured a stick figure in a pirate hat that was punching another stick figure in the chest.

  “Is that supposed to be your girlfriend?”

  Momo went painfully red.

  “Sumire?”

  “Duh. Unless you have other girlfriends you haven’t mentioned.”

  “Of course I don’t!”

  “The way you raised your voice just now was highly defensive. Suspicious.”

  Momo groaned loudly. She turned toward one of the dogs, which was very focused on tearing up one of Rebecca’s slippers. She noticed the dog had a collar that said Rocco.

  “Rocco,” she said. “Can you please go play fetch with Mallmart? I think she needs to be tired out again. She’s getting really annoying.”

  The dog didn’t comply. Momo couldn’t blame him.