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Even in the near-dark, I make out the face she pulls, like she suddenly regrets bringing it up. But she can’t exactly backtrack now, she knows damn well I won’t let her. Rolling onto her back, she sighs at the ceiling. “You used to call me mama.”

I go completely still. “What?”

Lux crosses her arms over her chest, fingertips drumming against her elbows. “You were five, I think. No, six, because we were living in Vermont, in that house with the creepy basement, you remember?”

I shake my head. I don’t remember many of the finer details from the years we spent bouncing around different houses, different states, different caregivers when Mom needed a break. Lux, Jackson, Grace, and Eliza, that’s what I remember. Us being together. Taking care of each other. That’s it.

“Anyway,” Lux continues. “We’d just gotten home from school and I was making dinner and helping you with some reading exercise or something and when we were done, you looked at me and you said, ‘thank you, mama.’ And I asked why you called me that and you said your teacher had asked your class about parents and what they did and everyone said their mommies cooked them dinner and helped them with their homework and took care of them, and you said I did all of that for you, so I was your mama, right?

I can’t remember if I corrected you, but if I did, you didn’t listen because it went on for a while.

When Mom got back from wherever the fuck she’d been, she overheard you and she got so pissed.

Tried to keep us apart. But every night, you’d sneak in with me. ”

I… Fuck, I don’t even know what to say to that. “I don’t remember that.”

“I’m not surprised. You were so young.”

And she would’ve been… eight? Nine? Nine years old and her little sister was calling her mama . “That’s so fucked up, Lux.”

“I know,” she agrees, head flopping towards me as she flashes a soft, sad smile. “Didn’t feel like it at the time.”

Of course it didn’t. It felt normal. That was normal for us.

Jackson and Lux were our parents, for all intents and purposes.

They raised us. That was what we knew, that was our life, and we didn’t question it for a really fucking long time, not until we got old enough to know better, and even then, nothing changed. They still took care of us.

“I don’t get it,” I whisper. “I don’t get how you’re not fucking furious, Lux. You and Jackson, you deserve to be, more than the rest of us.”

“I am. At the people who deserve it. Not at the entire world.”

A reasonable outlook, sure, but it still doesn’t make sense to me.

Pushing upright, I draw my knees up to my chest, picking at the edge of the comforter that covers them.

“We got fucked, Lux. Cosmically and genetically fucked. I can count the number of times I’ve seen my dad on one hand—I can’t even remember half of them.

We have zero connection with an entire half of our identity because our grandparents couldn't stand having a Japanese daughter-in-law so they chased her away, and she left us behind. I am stuck at eight years old, watching Mom fucking flee and knowing Dad never wanted us and overhearing everyone call us mistakes and hiding us like some dirty little secret, but I don’t deserve to be mad about that?

I’m so wrong for not being able to just… forget it?”

“I haven’t forgotten anything, Lottie. I’ve just moved on.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not that easy for me. I can’t move on from what he did to us.”

“ They ,” Lux corrects sharply, half-sitting up as shakes her head at me. “I don’t know what version of Mom you remember, but she wasn’t innocent.”

“It was different for her.”

“It was,” she agrees, but her head is still shaking, she still argues, “but that doesn’t mean her abusing us was okay.”

I flinch at that word, I look away, I roll my lips together, but Lux persists.

“You don’t think that’s what it was? Because she didn’t hit us or berate us or starve us?

She would leave us with strangers for weeks, Lottie.

She left us, for good, with our grandparents, knowing how they felt about us, how they would treat us.

She neglected us every day she was in our lives.

She didn’t want to be a mother, but she kept having kids because she did want a man to love her.

What the fuck else would you call that?”

Desperation. Loneliness. Addiction . “I don't wanna talk about this anymore.”

For the third time, Lux sighs, audibly disappointed yet she still scoots closer to snuggle against my back, she still whispers that she loves me, and as she does, something tickles the back of my mind.

A memory, not the one Lux was talking about, but a different time we shared a bed.

When I was eight and she was eleven and we’d just been dumped somewhere for the umpteenth time—what we didn’t yet know would be the final time—and I was so desperate for comfort from the person who gave me the most. That, I remember vividly.

Like I said, I remember it happening a lot.

What I can’t remember, though, is when exactly I decided to stop.