Excerpt
I lay on the pallet next to her, my hand on her belly, and under my palm the second heartbeat kept a schedule I had not set.
A heartbeat has a throat behind it.
I had built every calculation in this room around a sound. The chain’s length. The stand’s height. The wool I cut from the Tuesday shirt and stuffed into the ventilation grate. All of it engineering, all of it aimed at the same problem, which was keeping her audible only to me. The hum the stone absorbs, and the keen I answered with one word. Cats.
A child’s voice would not be mistaken for a cat’s. A child’s voice would bring Holst up out of the graveyard.
The cellar that I had called sanctuary was a trap, and the trap was not for her.
