“Would it be ok if I brought my wife with me?” Ava asked when I got to work. I’d just gotten Kitten settled in her basket with a few toys and was on my way back to hang my coat up when Ava bounced up to me. After staying with Cassie and Mac for a couple of days, I was ready to go sleep in my own bed. What none of us were really ready for was for me to be on my own, even though I longed for solitude. The compromise we’d come up with was for the rest of the coven to take turns sleeping at my house. Maybe compromise was an exaggeration, though. Mac pretty much told me to suck it up and deal with it, at least for the time being, and frankly the idea of at least being back in my own house was good enough for me.

  “And hello to you, too,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Oh, sorry, hi. Would it be ok if I bring my wife tonight? I mean, I usually go to bed at 6 or 7 so I wouldn’t be much help as a lookout anyway. But Yanna is a night owl. Especially now, with the baby on the way. I think he’s going to take after her. Well, I hope he does, anyway.”

  “She’s about due, isn’t she?” I asked, walking to the back room to hang up my coat. Ava walked with me

  “Another month at least,” Ava said, beaming. “Maybe closer to 6 weeks.”

  “Do you think it’s safe?” I asked. I was fairly certain it would be, but I hated the idea of endangering an innocent and very pregnant woman. Ava just laughed.

  “You know she’s been studying Bartitsu practically since she was a toddler, right?”

  “No,” I said, my brows shooting up, “I didn’t. I don’t even know what that is.”

  “It’s this really cool martial art that people do with a cane. It was invented in England, which is weird, but it’s based on some pretty solid Eastern martial arts practices, so it works pretty well.”

  “She can do that pregnant?” I asked.

  “She can,” Ava said, her smile wavering a little at the edges, irritation bleeding through. “She probably shouldn’t, but she does.”

  “I would never presume to tell a pregnant woman what she can and cannot do,” I said with a laugh, “especially one who is trained to beat people with a stick. Does she mind sleeping in a strange bed?”

  “Actually, she is kind of excited to meet you. She’s really curious about the group and wants to meet everybody before the baby comes.”

  “Does she know anybody you work with?” I asked, realizing I’d never really thought about meeting her before.

  “She and Mac get along. Back before pot was legalized she represented Mac in court on a possession charge. That’s how I met Mac, actually. Yanna introduced us after the case was dropped. I wanted to learn more about cannabis, and then we got to talking and suddenly, boom, I’m part of the coven. It was kind of cool. But there were only 5 of us back then. Genna didn’t join us until a couple of years ago and you just got here last year, so it’s been really cool watching it all grow. I don’t think we’re going to get to 13, though. Seven seems pretty comfortable for our group. Pretty balanced. But you know, who knows who will show up in the future?”

  “Yanna didn’t want to join the coven?” I asked, a little overwhelmed with Ava, as usual. Her mind tended to run a lot faster than anyone else’s, which was one of the reasons she liked baking. It gave her something to do that allowed her mind to quiet.

  “She’s a Jewish Buddhist; she said she already had enough going on spiritually, but since I’m a recovering Catholic it was really a better fit for me.”

  “A Jewish Buddhist pro-cannabis pregnant lesbian lawyer. She sounds pretty amazing,” I said. Ava blushed.

  “You’ll get to meet her tonight,” she said, “if that’s ok.”

  I looked over at Margie, a woman who, in one breakfast, had gone from someone I worked with and spent circle time with to an actual possible friend. She waved at me while she handed cookie samples to little kids who ran back to their mothers to show them their treat. I realized that it had been years since I’d taken the time to really talk to anyone. I’d known Mac and Cassie since we were kids, so moving to be near them had made the most sense when I’d needed to move. They’d helped me find a house and given me a job and even invited me to join their coven. I’d thought I was doing well with moving forward, but maybe I’d been isolating myself too much.

  “Who am I to turn away the most interesting woman in the world?” I asked, smiling at the short blonde. Her face exploded in a huge smile, her eyes shining.

  “I was thinking of sloppy joes with baked potatoes for dinner,” she said. “We call them Górge potatoes. I don’t know why.” She giggled a little bit, pronouncing it ‘hore-hay.’

  “I’ll be home around 6:30,” I said. “You two eat without me. There’s plenty of food at my place, so you don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to.”

  “We’ve been looking forward to this for a while now, so it’s really no trouble ,” she said. I tilted my head a little, giving her a look.

  “You’ve been waiting for me to be attacked psychically so you have to stay at my house?” I asked, knowing that’s not really what she meant but feeling it necessary to give her a little bit of a hard time. Her face flushed and her eys widened.

  “No, not that part. Yanna has been craving the potatoes so if we don’t have them she might kill me in my sleep. You know how pregnant women are.” I grinned at her so she’d know I’d been teasing.

  “Whatever you need to do. I appreciate you both staying with me.”

  “Do you think we should invite Officer Malcolm to join us if he’s still watching the house?” Ava asked. I studied her for a moment, trying to decide if this was some kind of setup for dating or romance or anything crappy like that, but I didn’t see that kind of plan in her eyes. She seemed to just think that maybe he might want food, at least as far as I could tell. Either she was an excellent poker player or she genuinely thought he should join us.

  “If he’s there I don’t see why not,” I said carefully. “No reason for him to eat fast food if someone is cooking so close to him. Margie gave him some muffins this morning and you would have thought she’d given him gold.”

  “I’ve had her muffins,” Ava nodded. “They’re better than gold.”

  Dinner that night was delicious, as expected. It was rustic, as most things involving baked potatoes tend to be, but watching the two women in front of me enjoy each other’s company so much made my heart feel lighter than it had in a long time. They touched each other casually, one starting a story and then the other finishing it. They told me how they met and about their wedding and about the baby, which they didn’t actually know the gender of and about which they had a bet going. They were partners who loved each other and who were in love with each other. They carried the conversation for the most part, which was fine by me since I was still a little worn down from dreams and stress from the last few days.

  According to Ava, Malcolm had taken a little convincing before he agreed to join us. It wasn’t really an approved procedure to mingle with people he was supposed to be protecting, but Yanna had finally insisted, and he’d accepted. He listened to their stories and asked lots of questions, occasionally throwing out little anecdotes of his own. I watched the three of them eat and laugh and enjoyed the feeling of warmth they were bringing to my kitchen. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed having people around me socially like this.

  “If this girl doesn’t move off my bladder soon, I’m going to ground her the minute she’s born,” Yanna said, shifting in her chair. Ava was instantly on her feet, helping her wife get up.

  “He’s a good boy,” she insisted. “At least let him finish breastfeeding before you punish him.” Yanna playful pushed Ava away once she was on her feet, and excused herself to the bathroom.

  “I brought home brownies for dessert,” Ava said, starting to collect plates. Malcolm was instantly on his feet, helping to clear the table. They stacked them next to the sink and Ava pulled a plastic-covered plate from the oven.

  “Why did you put them in the oven?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t turned on.

  “Force of habit mostly,” she shrugged. “Our cat, Oliver, either eats or walks on anything we leave on the counter. We started putting stuff in the oven or the microwave to keep it safe. Now it’s just kind of a habit.”

  “Why not the fridge?” Malcolm asked.

  “Well, for one thing, cold brownies aren’t nearly as good as warm ones with ice cream on them, and for another, the fridge will dry them out and that’s a crime against baked goods that I simply will not abide.” Ava started putting brownies in small bowls and lining them up for the microwave.

  “Have you ever forgotten you left something in there and then turned on the oven?” I asked.

  “She torched some donuts once,” Yanna said, coming out of the bathroom. She picked a brownie off the stack and broke a bite-sized chunk from it, popping it into her mouth.

  “That was a sad day,” Ava laughed. “Yeah, I forgot I’d gotten doughnuts and then decided I wanted to make a frozen pizza. I turned it on to preheat and pretty soon the smell of burning carbs filled the house.”

  “Not as bad as burned popcorn, but I swear I thought she was going to cry.” Yanna slipped an arm around her wife’s waist and gave her a kiss on the cheek before offering her a piece of brownie, too. Kitten sat at their feet, watching them eat. She wasn’t quite begging, but she was very intent on the brownie being shared. Yanna noticed her and leaned down and rubbed her face.

  “Brownies are not for puppies,” she said, rubbing the dog’s ears. Kitten was polite but her expression implied that she did not believe this statement. She liked the ear rubbing, though, so she gave the women a big grin. Ava scratched her head, too, and started putting brownies in the microwave, heating them up just a little, one at a time. The dog followed Yanna as she waddled back to the table.

  “I’m going to eat this brownie and then go to bed,” Ava said with a jaw-cracking yawn. “It’s been a long day.”

  “I’ll do the dishes,” Malcolm said, accepting his bowl of brownie sundae.

  “You can help me, anyway,” I said. “You guys really don’t have to cook and clean while you’re here, you know. You’re making me feel like a bad hostess.”

  “If you were just a hostess I might agree with you,” Yanna said, scooping a huge bite of dessert into her mouth. Her eyes closed briefly in ecstasy before she went on. “But you’re not. We’re here to make sure that weird guy doesn’t try to break in.” Ava’s face turned deep red and she gently smacked her wife’s shoulder.

  “You would make the worst spy,” she said, plopping down with the final bowl of food. “You’d just tell everything you know the minute someone gives you chocolate.”

  "I'm pretty sure everybody here knows what's going in," Yanna said once her mouth was empty again. "Were you supposed to keep it a secret? I mean, you did invite a cop to dinner and that cop seems pretty intent on keeping the neighborhood safe."

  "I always work on the assumption spouses tell each other everything," I said, scooping up my own brownie sundae. Still, mentioning the elephant in the room had changed the vibe a little bit and it was another moment or two before we all relaxed back into our companionable conversation.

  “Thank you all for dinner,” he said at last, pushing himself up out of his chair. Ava and I rose to our feet as well, preparing to walk him to the front door. “Do you mind if I use your bathroom before I head out? I have another officer who is going to be watching your house part of the night, but he won’t be here for a couple of hours.”

  “Of course,” I said, pointing to the half-bath off the kitchen. I knew he knew where it was because Yanna had been using it all night and he himself had used it the night before, but some impulses can’t be squashed. He half-smiled and nodded and went into the bathroom, locking the door behind himself. I looked at Ava, who was wilting and realized that she was going to have to get up in a few hours to go bake. I patted her shoulder and gestured for her to go upstairs. She nodded, kissed her wife on the cheek, and stumbled away.

  “My ex used to get tired like that,” I said, smiling at Yanna. “That man could fall asleep faster than anyone else I’ve ever met until now. I was always a little jealous. It takes me at least an hour to shut my brain down at night, unless I’m stoned. THC and a little melatonin knock me out for the count. Of course, I haven’t been doing that much lately. I want to be able to wake up as soon as I can.” I rinsed dishes and loaded the dishwasher while I waited for Malcolm to finish in the bathroom and leave. Yanna pulled a chair over to sit near me and Kitten put her paws on the woman’s lap, getting in her face and sniffing her chin and mouth.

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  “I hate going to bed early,” Yanna said, rubbing Kitten’s face. “But it’s kind of nice that Ava has to. Then we each get our own time by ourselves to unwind. I love her, but it’s also nice to know that I’ll have a couple of hours to myself every night.”

  “At least until the baby gets here,” I reminded her. She chuckled and rubbed her belly, which Kitten was sniffing.

  “I think that’s what’s going to make this a little easier. We’ll be able to do a shift change.”

  “Has Ava arranged maternity leave?” I asked. I couldn’t remember seeing anything on the calendar, but it was still early.

  “I know she talked to Mac about reducing her hours. I’m not sure what they’ve decided on, though. When I go back to work I think the baby will go with Ava. Your place is a lot more accepting of babies than my office is. Thankfully I’ll be able to work from home more, too. The only thing I’ll really need to show up for are court dates. My bosses are still adjusting to me telling them I’m not going to be in the office as much, but my assistant is on board. He’s already setting up my office and laptop with all the software I’ll need. I think he’s as excited about this baby as we are.”

  “That… seems weird,” I said, adding tablets to the dishwasher and turning it on. I wiped down the counters and table while we talked.

  “Well it’s his first niece or nephew,” she shrugged. My surprise must have shown because she laughed. “He’s married to Ava’s brother, Adam.”

  “Ava has a brother?” I asked. The last two days had really opened my eyes to the things around me I should have been noticing over the last couple of months.

  “They’re twins,” she said. I draped the dish rag on the divide between the sinks and leaned against the counter. We were still waiting for Malcolm to finish in the bathroom, and frankly, I was starting to worry a bit. He’d been in there for ten minutes already and it was really quiet. Had he left and I’d just forgotten? No, the door was still shut and there was light coming out from underneath.

  “Technically, this is her brother’s baby,” Yanna said, rubbing her belly. My head whipped toward her.

  “What?” I asked, the shock in my expression making her laugh.

  “No, I did not have sex with him,” she clarified. “This lady is only open for lady business. He donated sperm for us and she donated eggs for him. That way their kids will be genetic family. Adam and Mitch are planning on finding a surrogate when they’re ready to start their family, which I imagine will be soon. Ava considered carrying their baby but she decided it would be too hard to give it back. So she just gave them eggs with the promise of more if they needed them.”

  “Egg donation is so much more invasive than sperm donation, though,” I said.

  “She’s a tough woman,” Yanna said, her face shining with pride and love. “She and her brother are all the family they have. Their parents disowned them when they realized they were gay.”

  “I hate that so much,” I said, almost snarling. “It’s not like anyone had any control over that. I don’t understand how parents can do that to children they’ve raised from babies. You love who you love. Full fucking stop.”

  “I don’t get it either. My mother was thrilled, to tell the truth. One of my siblings is non-binary and my oldest brother is straight so mom says she collected the whole set.”

  “What about your dad?” I asked.

  “He is just glad we’re all in healthy relationships,” Yanna said. “His mother was extremely abusive, so he didn’t know how to love until he met my mother. She helped him break things off with his family. They are all still really messed up. I don’t even know most of my cousins on that side, though a few have tried to contact us. They just want money, though, so it’s not hard to tell them no. Dad said that he never wanted to see kids go through what he had to grow up with. He’s actually a therapist now, and works helping kids get out of abusive homes. He’s also really active with the foster system.”

  “Is your dad Dr. Rory McCoy?” I asked, my brain making quick connections.

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “How do you know about him?”

  “How could I not,” I asked, smiling. “My aunt and uncle are emergency foster parents. He was part of the group that vetted them and helped them get established in the system. He’s kind of a big deal with my family. Wow. It really is a small world.” I was thinking about pulling a chair over from the table when the bathroom door finally opened and Malcolm came out. I helped Yanna up and we walked him to the entryway where he pulled his coat from the closet.

  “Thank you so much for dinner,” he said, pulling his hat from his pocket.

  “Thank you for keeping an eye on the house,” I said.

  “It’s probably not the house that’s in danger, but you’re welcome. Yanna, it was great meeting you and Ava. Good luck with the baby, in case I don’t see you again.” Yanna laughed and stepped forward, hugging him. He leaned down and wrapped her in a hug. I stepped back slightly to give them room and to make it clear that I was not open to being touched.

  “You take care of you,” she said, pulling away again. “And I think we’ll see each other again. You’re always welcome in our home, too. Here’s my card. If you need anything, please call.” She pulled a business card from her pocket and gave it to him. He looked at it and nodded.

  “I hope I won’t need a lawyer,” he said with a smile, “but if I do, you’ll be my first call.”

  “Don’t be silly. We’re having a satyr in a couple of weeks. I’ll make sure Miranda gives you the details. You must try my Ava’s challah. It’s so good, it should be a sin.” We chatted a few more minutes at the front door before watching him walk down to his car, waving through the window.

  We watched television until eleven and then decided we were both tired after all. I wasn’t really used to going to bed this early, but it had been a long couple of days and I was ready to crash.

  My whole body felt like I’d been hit by a truck, so I was more than ready to call it a night. Yanna was slow-blinking in her chair when I tried to hand her the remotes, but she waved me off and moved the foot rest away from her chair, disrupting two cats and a dog who were snoring on her. Nemo ran off and Charlie immediately began grooming herself, as if it was her idea to suddenly find herself on the floor.

  I didn’t dream that night, or at least not in a way that hurt. Waking up was actually nice, with sunlight coming in the window. No smells of cooking this morning, but there was coffee in the air, so it was ok. I pushed the blankets back and set my feet on the floor, arching my back to pop my spine into place.

  Hands grabbed me from behind, covering my mouth and forcing me back across the mattress. I started to struggle, flinging my head back to try to catch my captor in the nose, hitting a shoulder or chest instead of a face. I realized Kitten wasn’t in the room and tried to call for her through my covered mouth.

  “Oh good, he found you,” Yanna said, leaning in the doorframe, sipping from a steaming mug. My arms were held to my sides so I couldn’t move, and even though my legs were free, no amount of kicking or twisting seemed to make much difference. Kitten wandered in and lay down beside the bed where I couldn’t see her. Yanna watched me struggle but didn’t seem bothered.

  “He said you knew him,” Ava said, joining her wife in the doorway. “We figured it was ok to just let him up.” I screamed against the fingers digging into my face, trying to open my mouth enough to bite my captor, but couldn’t seem to make my body work the way I needed it to.

  I snapped awake sitting straight up in bed in a dark room. Kitten started sniffing my face, trying to lick me, smelling my fear. A single shout had been enough to bring Ava into my room. She flipped on the light and came over. I flinched away from her without thinking and she drew back, sitting on the foot of the bed.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Was it the same dream?” I sat panting, glad that at least my body hadn’t betrayed me this time. My heart was racing and I was out of breath, but my stomach and bladder were handling themselves well.

  “It was different this time,” I told her, and then recapped everything. Yanna had made it to my room by now, and was sitting on the bed leaning against the wall.

  “I think this one was just stress,” I finally said, scooching back until I could lean against the headboard. Ava had gotten me a glass of water from the bathroom and I sipped it slowly. “I haven’t spent this much time around people in years and it’s a little stressful. I don’t know, though. Probably my brain telling me that even though I have a night off the big dreams, they’re still waiting in the background." I cradled my head in my hands and concentrated on my breathing. This whole situation was stupid, and the longer it went on, to less it made sense.

  “I don’t know either,” Ava finally said. She checked her watch. I noticed she was wearing her real clothes, not pajamas. “I need to get to work. There are too many loose ends and things that don’t make sense and without all the facts, I can’t help you. I feel like there's more going on that you don't want to share, and I get it. I’ll respect your privacy, and if you need me, I’m here and willing to help. We’ve warded your place, I’m assuming you have some kind of cleansing ritual you do to try to protect yourself. That’s all we can do. I don’t know what else to say.” She kissed her wife on the cheek, brushed her fingers down her arm and left. I listened to her go downstairs and shut the front door behind herself, then heard the locks tumble into place. I looked at Yanna, who was watching me carefully.

  “She doesn’t like being on the outside,” she told me, rubbing her stomach. “It gets to her when people she cares for don’t like her the same amount.”

  “I get that,” I said, letting my head thump back against the wall. “But I don’t talk about the past with anybody. Well, the recent past, anyway. I’ll talk about when we were kids and stuff. That’s easy. But some shit went down and I don’t want to deal with it anymore and I don’t want to think about it. I’m not keeping things from people on purpose, I just don’t want to talk about it. This is why I don’t let people come over. It just makes things too hard and they think they deserve to get parts of me.” I rubbed my face with my hands and stared at the ceiling. We sat quietly for a few minutes, each engulfed in our own thoughts.

  “When I was a little girl, my brother, Benny, pushed me down and my leg broke.” Yanna stared at the floor as she talked. “He had a bad temper, like my grandmother, and since we were kids he didn’t have the self control to keep from pushing or shouting or doing whatever he had to in order to vent his frustration. He was so scared when the bone pushed out of my leg. I was screaming and bleeding and he froze, not knowing what to do. My other brother, who was a girl back then, ran for help, but Benny just stared at me. It was like he’d turned into stone.

  “I remember telling him I was sorry for whatever it was I did to make him mad. I don’t even really remember that part anymore. Maybe I took something of his or broke something? I don’t remember. All I remember is the look on his face as he stared at me. He was so scared and upset, but also so ashamed. He started crying and came to sit by me, trying to hug me but it made my leg move and I screamed again. We were both crying so hard when our parents got there. He begged me not to tell what had happened because he didn’t want to get in trouble.

  “I remember Daddy splinting my leg with some sticks and then picking me up and running to the car. I held on to him so hard and my leg hurt so much, but I knew I was safe with him. I don’t remember a lot after that. I think the pain was so bad I passed out and then every time I came to, someone would bump me or I’d move wrong and it would hurt too much again. I don’t remember much until the next day. I’d had emergency surgery to set the bone and fix my leg and I was still in the hospital and on a lot of drugs.

  “Daddy and Mama sat next to my bed and held my hands and they asked me what had happened. Neither of my siblings was around, but Benny had been so upset that I didn’t want him to get in trouble. So I told them I’d tripped and fallen down the steps. I remember the look they gave each other. I didn’t understand it then, but now I know they knew I wasn’t telling them the truth.

  “Over the next few days, they asked me what had happened, and each time I told them I had tripped. By the time I was able to go home, I’d convinced myself that they believed me. When I got home, Benny had decorated my room with all the pink ribbons he could find, and all of my stuffed animals were on my bed, just waiting for me to snuggle into them. He tried to hug me but I flinched away, and that’s when my parents decided it was time to talk.

  “Dad told us about when he was a kid and how Grandmother had not been a good mother to any of her children. He told us some of the things that she had done and how it had made him feel unsafe and unloved. He didn’t tell us all the details then; we were too little to really understand, but he told us that when he had kids he’d wanted to do his best to help them feel safe. We told him we did feel safe and that we knew he and Mama loved us. We still didn’t know why he was telling us all of this.

  “He explained that when he was Benny’s age, he had a really bad temper, just like his mother, and he used to pick fights with kids at school when they made him mad. And then one day he’d picked a fight with the wrong kid and had gotten the stuffing kicked out of him. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part had been when their parents had come to pick them up from the principal’s office and he’d seen the other kid’s parents hug him and show that they were worried, even though they didn’t like that he’d been fighting. My dad knew he was going to get another beating when he got home for getting into trouble at school. Seeing his opponent get hugged and reassured that it was ok to defend himself had opened my dad’s eyes. He thought all parents hated their kids, but here this kid was, being told his folks loved him anyway.

  “Dad said he knew what really happened to my leg; Sarah had told them everything. He said he understood why I had lied to him and that, while it was good to be willing to protect your family, sometimes you needed to tell the truth, even if someone you loved got hurt. I remember crying and telling him I was sorry and Benny cried and said he was sorry for hurting me and for lying about it, and Sarah cried because the rest of us were crying, and Dad and Mama just held us all in this little bundle on my bed.

  “Benny had to go to counseling to learn how to handle his emotions. Eventually he started studying martial arts to give himself a physical outlet for his negative emotions. When we got older, Sarah and I went to counseling, too, and I followed him to the dojo to learn how to beat people up with a stick, just like my brother. But the thing was, we learned from our father that just because something is horrible doesn’t mean you can just let it go and never deal with it again, because chances are it’s going to come out of the past and haunt you. He dealt with his own fear of being a bad father by being willing to admit that his children might have some of the same problems that had caused his mother to become a monster. And he loved us enough to help us learn how to continue to break that cycle of violence so that we don’t have to carry it into the future. We know what to watch for and how to deal with it, and if we get stuck, he and Mama are there to help us. Yeah, we still did stupid kid things as we got older, but we always knew that our parents loved us and wanted us to be better and to learn from our mistakes. They weren’t perfect either, but we all learned to keep trying and help each other and to be understanding.

  “Ava didn’t really have that kind of a childhood. Her parents loved her and her brother as much as they could, but they were very religious and put their love of their god above the love they should have given to their children. She’s still dealing with that, but my parents have given her so much love and support that she’s in a much better place than she was when we met.

  “The point is, we all have bad things that happened to us in the past. Some of it’s big and some of it’s small and some of it seems inconsequential when compared to what other people have had to deal with, but that doesn’t mean our suffering is invalid. We still have to deal with the things that have happened to us and move forward. We can’t just leave stuff unexamined and undealt with because it will always come for you until you’ve put it to bed.

  “I know you went through some bad shit, but you haven’t been dealing with it and now it’s backing up on you. I don’t know what happened, but I do know that if you don’t deal with your shit, it’s going to kill you. If not your body, then your sanity. Ava and I are happy to stay with you as often as you need, at least until this baby comes, but you need to start figuring out your own mind so you can function in this world. You have a whole group of women who welcomed you into their lives and you’ve been holding them at arm's length. Get your head out of your ass and either accept them as the family they want to be for you or leave them the hell alone because I know Ava isn’t the only one who’s bothered by you refusing to take an interest in their lives.” Yanna pushed herself to her feet and I opened my mouth to respond but she held out her hand to stop me.

  “It’s late, I’m pregnant, and I’m tired, and I need sleep. You need to figure out what you need to do to start living again, and until you at least start making some kind of decisions about who you want to be when you grow up, I don’t have the energy to help you. The minute you figure out, you let me know. But I’m going to bed and I don’t need your excuses or anger or whatever else to be bouncing around in my head while I’m trying to sleep. We can talk more in the morning if you want, but I’m going to bed. Good night.” And she walked out of my room, Kitten following in her heels.