Chapter 46

He had had four episodes that week, all four around two in the morning. Everyone in the house was asleep, except for the couple who had the night watch. When I managed to regain control over my body and return to human form, I went to one of the sealed warehouses on the ground floor, the key to which only I had.

In that warehouse were stored the things that my father’s people recovered from my house in Alaska. Anya’s things, my things. After touching and smelling the contents of those boxes a little, I could sleep until dawn. Someday I had to start classifying them, and I decided to start one of those nights. I don’t even know why it bothered me. In the end, I knew that I would end up keeping more objects than I would discard; I was too attached to all those trinkets for the mere fact of knowing that they belonged to Anya, and that she, to a greater or lesser extent, treasured them. I would spend hours going through boxes until I got sleepy again and went back to bed.