It had been sitting there in the corner of the room, patient and warm and honest, waiting for me to notice.

I just had not known how to hear it.

My brows knit together.

I leaned in and inhaled again, longer this time, and the last of my terror began, very slowly, to collapse.

“This smells like,” I started, and could not finish the sentence, because my brain had not quite caught up with what my nose already knew.

So I did the thing you are absolutely never supposed to do with a bag of unidentified white powder, the thing that in any other version of this story would have been a spectacularly bad idea.

Slowly, hardly breathing, I dipped the very tip of my index finger into the fine soft powder, and I brought it to my tongue, and I tasted it, bracing for something bitter, something wrong.