It happened at three fourteen in the morning, which was, in Lina's experience, the hour at which the world chose to deliver its most significant events.
She had been asleep. Properly asleep, the deep and dreamless kind she had learned to find in the last few months, and then she was awake, pulled up by something she could not immediately name. Not the radiator. Not the city outside. Something closer.
From the basket in the corner, a sound.
Not crying. Not the sound of discomfort or hunger or the particular outrage Ivy deployed when she had been left horizontal longer than she considered appropriate. A sound she had not heard before.
Two syllables. Soft. Entirely certain.
"Mama."
Lina sat up.
The room was dark except for the thin line of streetlight under the curtain. She looked at the basket. Ivy was awake, sitting partially upright against the padded side, looking in her direction with the dark, serious eyes that caught light even in the dark.
"Mama," Ivy said again.
