Shauna had never thought a face could feel like a wound. Not the kind that bled, but the kind that stayed open no matter how much you picked at the scab. And yet, every time her eyes landed on them, it was there, raw, aching, impossible to look at for too long. It wasn’t their fault. They hadn’t asked to look the way they did, hadn’t asked for the shadow of a baby lost decades ago to follow them through every doorway. But the resemblance was there, sharp as bone, threaded into their jawline and the shape of their eyes. The universe had a cruel sense of humor. She tried to be fair. Tried to keep the smile on her face, the voice even. Breakfasts together, rides in the car, asking about homework, she could check all the boxes. But love was trickier. Love demanded letting go, and she’d never learned how to unclench her fists around grief.

They were younger than Callie, old enough to carry themselves with that restless hunger for independence, but still too young to be entirely out of reach. Shauna told herself that she’d bridge the gap when things “settled,” when she felt more… stable. But stable wasn’t a thing she’d ever been. Not since the woods. Maybe not ever.

It was worse on the quiet days, when there wasn’t enough noise to distract her. She’d catch a glimpse of them across the kitchen, shoulders hunched over their phone, and her mind would slip, twenty-five years backward, into snow and hunger and that empty feeling in her arms. She’d taste iron and hear crying that wasn’t really there. And then she’d blink, and it was just them again, looking back with that guarded expression that said they’d learned not to expect too much from her. That hurt in a way she didn’t have words for.

She wanted to tell them the truth. All of it. That she was broken before they were even born. That she was trying, even if “trying” looked like pulling away instead of drawing close. That some days the sight of them felt like holding her breath underwater, but it wasn’t because of anything they’d done, it was because of everything she had lost, and everything she still couldn’t face. But the words stuck. Callie had barely survived knowing the edges of the story; she couldn’t risk cutting another kid on the shards of her past.

So instead, Shauna leaned on habit. She drove them to school. She cooked dinner, sometimes. She asked questions she already knew they wouldn’t answer. And at night, she lay awake listening for sounds in the house that weren’t there, wondering if maybe the only reason she kept breathing was because she didn’t know how to stop.