And, I would learn, my actual mother had spent the end of her life trying to warn me about a danger neither of us could yet see the shape of.
Chapter 4 — The Cup on the Counter
That afternoon I walked into the kitchen, casually, and my morning mug was still sitting on the counter where I’d left it half-finished.
I looked into the bottom of it.
And there was something there — a faint chalky residue, a wrongness in the dregs that shouldn’t have been in a cup of chamomile tea.
I did not touch it.