Chapter 2:

The stairs creaked under his feet.

Hayato went down slowly, one hand dragging along the rough wooden wall for balance. Quinn's legs knew these stairs — the memory was there, worn smooth like a path through grass — but knowing and [feeling] were two different things. He counted seven steps without meaning to. Old habit. He'd always counted things when he was nervous.

The smell hit him at the bottom. Bread, something savory, woodsmoke running under all of it, warm air pressing against him like a hand on his shoulder. Nothing like his mother's kitchen, which always smelled faintly of instant soup and dish soap.

The grief twitched in his chest. He pushed it back down.

[Just walk in. Just be Quinn.]

He stepped through the narrow doorway into the kitchen.

It was small, and it looked lived-in the way a place only gets after years of the same three people moving through it. A heavy table sat in the middle with three chairs around it, one more worn than the other two — Quinn's, he realized, from the memory of it. A cast iron pot hung over the hearth, and a woman stood in front of it stirring something with a long wooden spoon, her back to him.

Mara Hale was shorter than he'd expected from the memories. Round-cheeked, dark hair pinned loosely at the back of her neck, an apron wrapped twice around her waist. She moved through her kitchen like someone who'd never once questioned that it was hers.

She didn't turn around right away.

"Sit down, porridge is almost ready," she said. "And you took your time. I called you three times."

"Sorry," Hayato said.

Mara turned then, just enough to set a bowl on the table — and paused. Not long. Half a second, maybe less.

Then she put the bowl down and turned back to the hearth. "Sorry, she says. Very formal this morning."

Hayato sat down carefully and said nothing.

[Too stiff. Sit like you're eleven, not like a sixteen-year-old trying not to be noticed.]

He let his shoulders drop, folded his hands in his lap. Better.

The back door swung open and cold morning air came in with it, and then Edric Hale, carrying a bundle of firewood against his chest like it weighed nothing at all. He was a big man, broad through the shoulders, Quinn's same blonde hair cropped short, a jaw that looked cut from the same wood he was carrying. The kind of face that took its time changing expression but was warm once it got there.

He dropped the wood beside the hearth with a heavy clunk and glanced at the table.

"There she is," he said. "Thought you'd gone back to sleep."

"I was awake."

"Mm." Edric pulled out his chair and sat with the unhurried ease of a man who'd never once been in a hurry in his life. He looked at Hayato for a second, calm grey eyes. "You alright?"

"Yes."

"You look like you're sitting in someone else's chair."

Hayato blinked, then softened his posture a little more, chin down, trying to remember how Quinn's memories *felt* rather than how his own body wanted to hold itself.

"Still waking up," he said.

Edric looked at him a beat longer, then nodded and reached for the bread. Satisfied, apparently. Hayato let out a breath through his nose.

Mara set the porridge down and took her seat, untying her apron and folding it over the back of her chair, same as she had every morning for eleven years of Quinn's memory. She looked at Hayato with the particular look of a mother taking inventory of her child across a breakfast table.

"You didn't grab bread on the way in," she said.

Hayato glanced at the bread. "I wasn't—"

"You always grab bread on the way in. Since you were six." She tilted her head slightly. "And you didn't complain about the cold. You complain about the cold every morning."

"I wasn't cold today."

"It's the same temperature it was yesterday."

Edric tore off a piece of bread without looking up. "Leave the girl alone, Mara. Maybe she grew up overnight."

"She's eleven, Edric. Nobody grows up overnight."

"I'm fine, Mama," Hayato said.

The word came out before he'd thought about it. [Mama.] Quinn's word, not his, surfacing from borrowed memory with an ease that caught him off guard. Something moved through his chest at the sound of it — not quite pain, not quite comfort.

Mara studied him a moment longer. Then her face eased into something mostly reassured, with just a thin thread of not-quite-convinced still running under it.

"Sleep well?"

"Yes."

"No bad dreams?"

Hayato thought about a truck. About a little girl stumbling safe onto the pavement. About a sticky note on a refrigerator.

"No," he said. "No bad dreams."

Mara nodded and picked up her spoon. "Good. Eat before it's cold."

The porridge was thick and simple and faintly sweet with something Hayato couldn't place, though Quinn's tongue knew it right away — a particular honey her father traded for at the market in the next village, bought every month without fail, because Quinn had liked it as a small child and Edric had never once thought to stop.

Hayato ate slowly, watching the two of them from under Quinn's eyelashes.

Mara talked the way some people breathe, without seeming to notice she was doing it. The weather turning. The Aldren family two roads over, whose fence had finally given out. The bread she meant to bake that afternoon. Whether the root vegetables were ready to pull. She asked questions and mostly answered them herself, and refilled Hayato's bowl without waiting to be asked.

Edric took it all in with the patient quiet of a man long used to being the audience. He put in short answers when one was needed — probably another week on the roots, yes, the fence had been leaning since spring — and ate with the same steady, unhurried focus he did everything else with.

It was, Hayato realized slowly, a very particular kind of warmth. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just two people who'd built a life together one small piece at a time until it fit without gaps.

Something about it pressed on a bruise he hadn't known was there.

[My parents ate breakfast separately.] Different schedules. They left notes.

He stared down at his porridge.

"Quinn."

He looked up. Mara was watching him.

"You've gone quiet again," she said. Not an accusation — just an observation, the same careful maternal attention she'd been aiming at him all morning, and which Hayato was starting to understand would be the hardest part of living in this house.

"Just thinking."

"About what?"

He searched Quinn's memories fast, grabbing for anything ordinary. "About whether the Aldren fence is going to fall on their chickens."

Edric made a short sound that might have been a laugh.

Mara blinked, then smiled — wide, sudden, real, crinkling at the corners of her eyes. "That is a very practical concern, actually. Poor things."

"They'll be fine," Edric said. "Chickens have survived worse than a fence."

"You don't know that."

"I know chickens."

"You know *our* chickens. The Aldren chickens are an entirely different matter."

Hayato watched them go back and forth and felt the pressure behind his eyes let up, just a little. He picked his spoon back up.

[Okay. I can do this.]

After breakfast Edric pushed his chair back.

"Wood's not going to stack itself," he said. "You coming?"

It took Hayato a second to realize he was being spoken to. He glanced at Mara, who was already clearing bowls and nodding along like this was simply how the world worked — which, in Quinn's memory, it was. Saturday mornings, helping her father stack the week's wood before the cold set in for good.

"Yes," Hayato said, and stood.

Outside the air was sharp and clean, pale morning light coming through the trees at the edge of the property in long flat bands. Edric went to the pile of cut wood by the side of the house and started handing pieces to Hayato without any ceremony, the two of them falling into a rhythm like they'd done this a hundred times.

Because they had. Quinn had.

Hayato stacked carefully, fitting the pieces the way Quinn's memory showed him — the pattern Edric liked without ever having explained it, largest logs at the base, tighter toward the top to cut the wind.

They worked without talking for a while. It wasn't uncomfortable. Edric didn't seem to feel any need to fill the silence, and if Hayato was honest, he'd always been more comfortable in quiet than he let on.

"You stacked that wrong," Edric said eventually.

Hayato looked at the wood, then at Edric.

"Third row." Not unkind. "You went tight too early. Wind'll knock it down by Thursday."

"Sorry." He fixed it.

Edric watched him, passing over another log. "You're apologizing more than usual today."

"Am I?"

"Quinn doesn't apologize much. Gets that from her mother." The corner of his mouth twitched. "Don't tell Mara I said that."

Something loosened in Hayato's chest, unexpectedly — something that wanted, dangerously, to be a laugh. He pressed his lips together. "I won't."

Edric nodded, satisfied, and handed him another log.

They went back to stacking. A bird called somewhere in the tree line. Smoke was rising from the chimney now, thin and pale against a white morning sky.

"Papa," Hayato said, before he'd decided to say it.

The word caught him off guard the same way [Mama] had at breakfast — surfacing from Quinn's memory unbidden, honest, heavier than he expected.

Edric looked over.

"Nothing," Hayato said quickly. "Just — nothing. Never mind."

Edric studied him a moment with those calm grey eyes. Then, without a word, he reached over and rested one big hand on top of Hayato's head, briefly, the way Quinn's memory told him he'd been doing since she was small enough to need it.

He didn't say anything. Just turned back to the wood pile.

Hayato stood very still.

[Don't. Don't.]

But his eyes were burning anyway, and it had nothing to do with the cold, and he was grateful, at least, that Edric Hale was the kind of man who faced the wood pile instead of his daughter when he wanted her to know he cared.

Hayato stacked the next log carefully and didn't say anything either.