It was a Tuesday in early winter, the kind of evening where the cold had arrived properly and the compound's windows had gone gold with lamplight an hour before the sky actually finished going dark.
Rowan was five now — had been for three months, the birthday marked with the specific compound-wide warmth that birthdays got here, a cake Darius had attempted and mostly succeeded at, Pip and several other school friends, a party that had run long and ended with most of the children asleep on various surfaces by the time their parents collected them.
Five had brought a new kind of question. Not the constant "why" of three, which had mostly resolved into actual conversations now, but something more specific — Rowan had started asking about the past. Not abstractly. Specifically. Her own histo
