thought Raelynn would try to find you, and I told her the truth, which was yes. So they gave you a different first name. That was me too. You can put that on the pile."
"Where is she now?"
"Grand Junction. She works at a greenhouse, a big commercial one, poinsettias and tomatoes. She's been on the right medicine since 2012. She's married to a decent man who drives for UPS. They've got a boy. He's nine." He let that sit a moment, and she saw him watch it land: a brother. A half brother, nine years old, in Grand Junction. "She doesn't forgive me. For the step. For the phone call. For signing you away to strangers instead of fighting to give you back to her when she got well. She's got a case. I'd have to think hard to say she's wrong. We talk on her birthday and at Christmas, five minutes, about the weather."
He reached into his vest and took out a phone, an old one with a cracked corner, and pressed at it with one thick thumb, and turned it toward her on the workbench, the way he had turned the wallet on Saturday.
It was a text thread. The contact name was RAE. There were not many messages in it. She could see years at a glance, the gray bubbles and the blue ones, short. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas Dad. Happy birthday Rae. Thanks. And between them, once a year, always on the same date, the same exchange. October 17, 2025: Three? And from him: Three. October 17, 2024. Three? Three. Back and back, as far as the screen showed. And at the bottom, Saturday, at 6:12 in the evening, the same.
Three?
Three.
"She's never once said your name to me," Elam said. "Not once since that summer. Never asked where you went or who has you. I don't think she can. But she asks me that, every year, on your birthday."
Cassia looked at the word on the screen for a long time.
"She knows about the dolls," she said.
"She was Mama," he said simply. "I told her that, the one time she let me tell her anything. In 2013. She cried so hard she had to pull off the road. I don't know if that was a kindness, telling her. I've never known."
Cassia stood up from the milk crate. Her legs felt strange. She looked at the two princesses leaning against the pencil mug, Mama with her one arm and Rumble with her bow, and at the empty space beside them where the third one should have been.
"Daffy's at the bottom of Lake Pueblo," she said. "Did they tell you that? I dropped her off the dock when I was six. She sank."
He looked at the space too.