Page 23 of Tracking Snow

Seven of them.

Just like us.

Maybe it means something, Three says.

It means nothing, Seven’s deep dark voice presses, pushing the thought away.

"What happened?" Snow asks softly, suddenly dropping the moment between us into a vat of intimate warmth despite the wet cold on my face. "I mean, if you are okay talking about it. Again, I’ve been told I don’t have a lot of tact, but I guess I’m someone who prefers to dance with skeletons rather than lock them away in a closet."

That’s all I do. My existence is a series of opening and shutting doors to hide the ugliness behind them. But as soon as I lock it away, another door swings open, and out comes another part of me I can’t suppress no matter how hard I try.

Though there is one part of me that I have managed to lock up and throw away the key to.

Before I know what I’m doing, my mouth opens. "When I was a kid, I was sick and needed treatment to cure me. Instead of getting better, I...fractured into this. So what’s your trauma?" I ask, barreling on to keep her from asking what kind of sickness I had.

Her hand drops, and I take a step forward, my body wanting to close the gap. Thankfully, she’s faced the ocean and doesn’t notice. I turn to look out at it with her, but my arm is so close to her shoulder I can feel the heat of her body.

"Eh, it’s pretty cliche. I'm just some orphan girl who ran away from the foster home when I couldn’t take it anymore. But the freedom wasn’t all I’d made it out to be. I had to lie about my age to secure shitty waitress jobs to keep from living on the streets. The service industry is a soul-sucking chasm that kept making me smaller and smaller until I almost…poof," she snaps her fingers, "disappeared entirely."

"That’s...cliche?"

Ask her what happened to her parents, Five says.

Put your arm around her and comfort her, Four urges. Though I doubt his intentions are pure.

Admittedly, some part of me does want to. I want to enfold her in my arms, press her to me and set my head atop of hers. I want to make her feel the last thing she should feel around me.

Safe.

"What happened to your parents?" I ask.

She shrugs. "They died in a house fire before I could even walk. Honestly, I don’t remember them."

Her tone is even, just stating facts. I would have pegged her to be more emotional about it. "For sharing trauma, you don’t seem that traumatized by it."

A small smile ghosts across her lips before fading. "You can’t miss what you never had."

It takes everything in me not to react. To freeze every reactive tissue in my body so it doesn’t flare or flex.

Snow couldn’t understand. She couldn’t know what she just said plunged a blade straight into my heart.

All our hearts.

Snow's words slide in layer by layer until it cuts through even the deepest, most buried heart we have. Seven’s.

He almost flinches. Almost.

I know what it’s like to miss a parent’s love.

To know what it felt like before it was severed. Taken away. It’s like having lived in the safe warmth of the sun before being dropped into a cold, dark expanse, like an ocean, or outer space.

"What is it?" she searches my eyes, somehow gleaning something is wrong. Again. Are we really that transparent?

I open my mouth, shut it. It’s the normally quiet Three who nudges the words out of me.

"I had my mother’s love. I miss my mother’s love."

We miss it, Three gently corrects, but I don’t add it out loud.