Chapter 2:

The stairs creaked under his feet.

Hayato descended slowly, one hand trailing 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 different things. He counted seven steps without meaning to. An old habit. He had always counted things when he was nervous.

The smell hit him at the bottom. Bread and something savory, woodsmoke underneath everything, warm air that pressed against him like a gentle hand. It was nothing like his mother's kitchen which had always smelled faintly of instant soup and dish soap.

The grief twitched in his chest. He pressed it down.

[Just walk in. Just be Quinn.] 

He stepped through the narrow doorway into the kitchen.

It was a small room, honest and lived in. A heavy table sat in the center with three chairs around it, one slightly more worn than the others — Quinn's, he realized from the memories. A cast iron pot hung over the hearth where a woman stood stirring something with a long wooden spoon, her back to him.

Mara Hale was shorter than he expected from the memories. Warm and round cheeked, dark hair pinned loosely at the back of her neck, an apron tied twice around her waist. She moved around her kitchen with the authority of someone who had never once doubted her place in it.

She didn't turn around immediately.

"Sit down, the porridge is almost ready," she said. "And you took long enough. I called you three times."

"Sorry," Hayato said.

Mara turned then, just slightly, to set a bowl on the table — and paused.

Not long. Just a half second.

Then she set 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 an eleven year old, not like a sixteen year old boy trying not to be noticed.] 

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

The back door swung open and cold morning air rushed in with it, followed by Edric Hale carrying a bundle of firewood against his chest like it weighed nothing. He was a big man, broad through the shoulders, with Quinn's same blonde hair cropped short and a jaw that looked like it had been cut from the same wood he carried. He had the kind of face that was slow to change expression but warm when it did.

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

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

"I was awake," Hayato said.

"Mm." Edric pulled out his chair and sat down with the unhurried ease of a man who moved through the world at his own pace. He looked at Hayato for a moment with calm grey eyes. "You alright?"

"Yes."

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

Hayato blinked. Then quickly softened his posture a little more, dropping his chin, trying to remember how Quinn's memories felt rather than how his body wanted to hold itself.

"Still waking up," he said.

Edric looked at him a moment longer, then nodded and reached for the bread in the center of the table. Satisfied, apparently. Hayato exhaled slowly through his nose.

Mara set the porridge down and took her seat, untying her apron and folding it over the back of the chair the way she did every morning according to eleven years of Quinn's memory. She looked at Hayato with the particular expression of a mother cataloguing her child across the breakfast table.

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

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

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

"I wasn't cold today."

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

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

"She's eleven, Edric, she hasn't grown up overnight."

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

The word came out before he'd thought about it. [Mama.] Quinn's word, not his, rising up from borrowed memory with an ease that surprised him. He felt something strange move through his chest at the sound of it — not quite pain, not quite comfort. Something caught between the two.

Mara studied him a moment longer. Then her expression softened into something that was mostly reassured with just a small thread of not-quite-convinced still running through it.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked.

"Yes."

"No bad dreams?"

Hayato thought about a truck. About a little girl stumbling safe to 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 gets cold."

The porridge was simple and thick and slightly sweet with something Hayato couldn't identify but that Quinn's tongue recognized immediately — a particular honey her father traded for at the market in the next village over, bought every month without fail because Quinn had liked it as a small child and Edric had never thought to stop buying it.

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

Mara talked the way some people breathe — continuously and without apparent effort. She talked about the weather, which was turning, and the Aldren family two roads over whose fence had finally collapsed, and the bread she was planning to bake in the afternoon, and whether Edric thought the root vegetables were ready to pull yet. She asked questions she mostly answered herself. She refilled Hayato's bowl without asking if he wanted more.

Edric listened to all of it with the patient quiet of a man long accustomed to being the audience. He offered short responses when they were required — [probably another week on the roots, yes the fence has been leaning since spring] — and ate with steady unhurried focus.

It was, Hayato realized slowly, a very specific kind of warmth. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just two people who had built a life together small piece by small piece until the whole thing fit together without gaps.

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

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

He stared at his porridge.

"Quinn."

He looked up. Mara was watching him.

"You've gone quiet again," she said. Not accusing. Just observing, the way she had been observing him all morning with that careful maternal attention that Hayato was beginning to understand was going to be his greatest challenge in this house.

"Just thinking," he said.

"About what?"

He searched Quinn's memories quickly, desperate for something 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 she smiled — wide and sudden and real, crinkling the corners of her eyes. "That's 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 a completely different matter."

Hayato watched them volley back and forth and felt the pressure behind his eyes ease by a fraction. He picked up his spoon again.

[Okay,] he thought. [Okay. I can do this.] 

After breakfast Edric pushed back his chair and looked across the table.

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

It took Hayato a moment to realize he was being spoken to. He glanced at Mara who was already clearing the bowls and nodding as though this was the natural order of things — which in Quinn's memory it was, Saturday mornings, helping her father stack the week's wood before the cold came in properly.

"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 moved to the pile of cut wood by the side of the house and began passing pieces to Hayato without ceremony, falling into a rhythm like they'd done it a hundred times.

Because they had. Quinn had done it a hundred times.

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

They worked in silence for a while. It wasn't uncomfortable. Edric was a man who didn't seem to feel the need to fill quiet, and Hayato had always been more comfortable in silence than he let people know.

"You stacked that wrong," Edric said eventually.

Hayato looked at the wood. Then at Edric.

"The third row," Edric said, not unkindly. "You went tight too early. Wind'll knock it by Thursday."

"Sorry." Hayato adjusted it.

Edric watched him, passing another piece of wood. "You apologize more than usual today."

"Do I?"

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

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

Edric nodded, satisfied, and passed him another log.

They stacked in silence again. A bird called somewhere in the tree line. Smoke was coming from the chimney now, thin and pale against the white morning sky.

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

The word surprised him the same way [Mama] had at the breakfast table — rising up from Quinn's memory unbidden, honest, with a weight he hadn't expected.

Edric looked over.

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

Edric studied him for a moment with those calm grey eyes. Then he reached over without a word and briefly, lightly, rested one large hand on top of Hayato's head the way Quinn's memory told him he always had since she was very small.

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

Hayato stood very still.

[Don't,] he told himself firmly. [Don't.] 

But his eyes were burning anyway, and it had nothing to do with the cold morning air, and he was grateful that Edric Hale was a man who faced the wood pile and not his daughter when he showed he cared.

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

End of chapter 2