Page 119 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“Wow,” Maison murmurs behind her, his hand settling on the small of her back, gentle, before he too touches the carving of her name. “This wasn’t done by magic.”

She hadn’t even thought that, but her breath hitches again, and with a quickness she didn’t know she had in her bones, flips off the rest of the sheet in front of her.

There’s a small pink table, carved for a toddler, with flowers painted on the edges. A tiny bookcase, a car seat, and a photo album.

Maison and her glance at each other just long enough for her to glimpse the seriousness in his gaze, before she sits, cross legged on the floor of the attic, pulling the photo album towards her.

The spotting scope forgotten, Maison folds himself next to her, as her hands shake to open it.

It’s incongruently frilly, in the way that was popular when Delina was born, with pastel pink fabric and lace on the front, and her name stitched on.

The first picture is of her father, smiling widely, standing next to a largely pregnant woman, who’s jawline echoes Delina’s own, and who’s eyebrows match hers.

Her mother.

She has darker hair than Delina, and the makeup is a couple decades old, but her blue eyes are bright and her cheeks are round from grinning. She holds a hand over the belly, protective, and her other hand holding Delina’s father’s shoulder.

It’s a casual portrait, the type taken by a friend at an event, and the only photo Delina’s ever seen of her.

“Oh my god,” Delina murmurs, and Maison rubs between her shoulder blades.

The next picture was of the two of them at the same event, laughing, the picture blurry, but her dad’s scrunched up face is as familiar as they come.

The next is at a baby shower, pink balloons everywhere, and her mother glowing, a large group of friends crowded behind her, everyone beaming.

In the background, grinning just as proudly, is Korhonen, wearing an outdated suit and having much more hair.

“Oh, I know them,” Maison says, pointing at another couple, all decked out in early nineties finery, and their faces are completely unfamiliar. “Two demonologists, they wanted to train me to be an assassin.”

“You’d be a terrible assassin,” Delina replies automatically, unthinking.

“That was the conclusion they came to,” Maison says, then points to another person, younger than the rest, also smiling. “That was my third-grade teacher, I think.”

“Oh my god,” Delina says, but her eyes keep on straying back to her mother. “These were literally her work friends before…”

Before whatever experiment it was that she had put on Delina. Before whatever sanctions they put on her, before she scared everyone. Before whatever insanity she had gone through.

The man who literally tried to kill Delina attended her baby shower before she was born.

And now he was dead at her hands.

Swallowing another lump, Delina turns the page.

There, a picture of her mother lying on a hospital bed in a medical gown, her hair messed up, holding a sleeping newborn to her chest. Underneath, written in pen, the words ‘Delina Joyanna Frisse, born at 8:49 AM.’

There’s a handcuff on her mother’s wrist, locking her to the bed.

Baby Delina was tiny, red-faced in her sleep, smaller than she should be.

The oldest photo of her Delina can remember is when she’s much bigger, healthy and chubby, in her dad’s arms.

Delina rubs her face. After all the emotions of the day, after the phone calls and the breakdown sitting on the floor with Maison, everything is just…wrung out. There should be more feelings, there should be more sensations welling up inside of her, but instead she’s just…tired.

“Oh, you were so small,” Maison whispers. Somewhere around year three of dating, her father had shown him all of the baby pictures they had just to embarrass her, and all of them were far healthier.

“I guess I really do look like my bio-mom,” Delina says, though the words don’t seem real. “People keep saying that.”

She turns the page, the handcuffs sticking in her mind.

---