Page 25 of Owned By Two

A spark.

I immediately wiped it from my mind.

It couldn’t have been a spark. I mean, how could there be?

No, if there was a spark, it had come from the electrical appliance.

I tried to ignore the fact it wasn’t plugged in, much less switched on.

I shook my head. I wasn’t an electrician. I didn’t know how things like that were put together, much less how they worked.

I cupped my hand to myself, somehow still feeling that spark of energy on my index finger’s tip.

I peered over at Uhti as ifhehad been the one to cause it.

It was at least possible, wasn’t it?

I knew as much about his species and the kind of powers they might possess as I did about toasters.

He ignored my earlier suggestion and didn’t stop picking up the pieces.

He didn’t attempt to put them back together again — perhaps he knew as much about such things as I did — and instead placed them in a pile on the shelf they had fallen from.

“Earlier, you told me to stop saying something,” he said.

“I did?” I said, lost in a world of my own.

He nodded. “You said it shortly after I said this whole place belongs to you.”

“Yes,” I said. “Please don’t repeat that.”

“Why not? It’s the truth.”

“It might be the truth but…” I shook my head. “I don’t like hearing it.”

He looked me over again with that same bemused expression. “You know, not hearing something, not admitting the truth, doesn’t make it any less true.”

I nodded and felt the tears already beginning to burn my eyes. “I know. It’s just… It’s hard to learn this.”

“Learn what?”

“That all this…” I said, motioning to the mansion and its surrounding lands — no, the surroundingplanet.

“That it’s all yours?”

I shook my head. “No. That it washis.”

My legs felt weak and I could hardly keep myself upright.

I moved to a small novelty plastic chair with a cartoon penguin on it and sat — no, more likefell— into it.

Uhti moved to an old-style water dispenser and filled a small paper cone cup and handed it to me.

I slurped from it, mindless about how long the water had been sitting there.

“Why is it hard to accept this belonged to your father?” he asked.

I shook my head. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about — much less with my father’s assistant.

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