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The key is for the thing your father left. He says you'll know where when you need to. I told him that's not how children work and he laughed at me for an hour.

I don't know what you would look like but I've decided you'd have his mouth.

Be difficult my darling girl. Be you always. It's what got you here.

Mom

I read the letter four times.

By the fourth, I wasn't really reading anymore. I kept returning to the same sentences, as though repetition might make them easier to understand.

I would do it again to have you.

Not save me. Not protect me.

Have me.

My mother had made some kind of arrangement before I was born, and whatever it had cost, she'd known there would be a price. She hadn't stumbled blindly into something she didn't understand. She hadn't been deceived by someone more powerful than she was. She had chosen it with her eyes open, and she'd been worried enough about what Danika might eventually tell me to leave the truth hidden inside a wall.

Don't let her tell you I didn't choose.

I folded the letter carefully along the creases my mother had made twenty-six years ago and put it back inside the tin. Then I closed the lid and rested both hands over it because I no longer trusted myself with the paper.

River hadn't moved. Rain whispered against the windshield while the heater hummed beneath the silence. Outside, a man in a black apron stepped through the back door of the hardware store, looked at the weather, and immediately went back inside.

"She made a deal," I said.

"I read it." He didn't deny he was reading along with me. I didn't mind that he did.

"With who?"

"There aren't many options for deals."

I turned toward him. "Say it anyway."

"You already know."

I did, and I hated it.

Danika sold her soul to Leviathan to seal my magic. That was the story I'd carried since I was twenty-four, fitting everything I learned around it because it was one of the few pieces of my history I'd believed was settled. My mother died siphoning power out of an infant. My grandmother traded her soul to seal what remained.

Two sacrifices made for the same child, except only one had ever come with a price anyone bothered to explain.

What did you pay with, Mom?

The question brought another memory with it: a dark river, a hall lined with tapestries where infant devils giggled from woven scenes, and the ferryman crouching until his face was level with mine.

No one crosses the river without me knowing. If she has paid the price, I have granted passage.

I'd heard an answer that day because I'd desperately wanted one. Now, sitting in a hardware-store parking lot with my mother's letter beneath my hands, I finally heard what the creature who could not lie had actually said.

If.

He had never told me my mother crossed the river. He had never said she paid him anything. He'd told me what would have happened if she had paid the price, and I'd filled in everything else because it matched the story I already knew.

Two years ago, I'd walked away from that riverbank believing a creature incapable of lying had confirmed my mother's fate.

He hadn't confirmed a damn thing.