What Trading Costs

I got between them the way I always did, the way I'd been doing since I was nine years old and figured out that a body between two people changes what happens to both of them.

This time it didn't work the way it usually did.

I don't remember all of it clearly, and I've been told that's normal, that the mind sometimes protects you from the parts it can't do anything useful with. What I remember is the shape of Denise's hand closing around my arm hard enough that something inside it gave with a sound I felt more than heard, and Milo, somehow still in his crib, screaming in a way that filled the whole room, and my own voice, distant and strange, telling Denise to stop, that I'd take it, that she could just—

She didn't stop right away this time.

When it was over, my left arm hung wrong at the elbow in a way arms aren't supposed to hang, and Denise stood over both of us breathing hard, looking, for just a second, like she understood she'd finally done something too big to be trimmed down into an acceptable explanation.

"You fell," she said. "Down the stairs, reaching for him. You understand me, Dominic?"

I looked at my arm. I looked at Milo, still shaking in his crib, red-faced and hiccupping.

For the first time in two years, I didn't nod.