Chapter Text
There was a knock at the door and Shruti almost didn’t answer it. That was a patently ridiculous response to have as she had invited the knocker in the first place. Yet, for the past ten years of renting the first floor of the tidy house on the corner, she had very rarely had guests over. The intrusion of even an invited visitor rankled even as she tidied away a last stack of papers.
Arun was working in his bedroom, oblivious to her distress as he tackled whatever thorny problems had been set before him today. For the best.
She checked herself in an oval mirror by the door, smoothing back a single strand of hair that had escaped her braid. The gold rim of her glasses gleamed. In odd moments, she could still feel Tadershecourt’s fur under palm, the odd wiry softness of it like an expensive brush left a tingling of nerve endings. Maybe she would always feel it on some level now, but that was a small price to pay.
“What if I get new glasses?” She had asked. “Prescriptions change.”
“Touch them to the old. You will see as you need to see, Oracle. ”
“Oracles see the future. I don't.”
“Oracles see unclouded,” he corrected with a low rumble. “Humans are too concerned with the future. Clear sight to what is before you matters more. That's what keeps you alive. Now you will see only when you wish to see and you will find more power in the trickle than the flood.”
The knock sounded again. Irrefutable and stubborn.
She opened the door and Evan's hand dropped back down to his side, apparently ready to knock a third time. The unusually sunny day did him no favors. His too-pale skin was sallow in direct light while the dark swath of his hair gleamed unnaturally. The heat robbed him of a habitual outer layer that usually hid his wiry strength and collection of scars. His shadow was with him today, but had separated from his feet to investigate her overgrown flower beds. Ghosts were supposed to be the thing of nighttime scares, but Evan looked his most haunted at noon.
“I like your garden,” Evan said and he sounded utterly sincere, even though it was clearly a mess.
“Thank you,” she said. “Come inside.”
She stepped aside and Evan crossed the threshold. It shouldn’t mean anything, but Evan brought the weight of entire world with him. He stood in her living room, next to her coffee table littered with her work and the thin layer of fur that Benji left everywhere. In her head, this had been the hardest part, having him stand in her space as real as anything else in her world. Like welcoming magic itself to take the final step towards her.
In actuality, it was entirely normal. Evan stood with his habitual tenseness, surveying the space like he might be attacked by her pile of academic journals. More than he was a mage, he was a man, who was in many ways still a boy. Her boy. She had laid claim to him with less thought than she had invited him over. It should be this easy. She liked him. He should be invited to her home every once and a while. Why was she like this? Why hadn’t she had him over before? Superstitions and stupidity. Things she tried to hold herself above whenever possible and yet they clawed her down time and again.
“I was about to put the kettle on. Tea?”
“Please,” he followed her as if on a string into the kitchen with its view of the garden. His shadow darted through the rose bushes.
“Thank you for coming over. I know it was a little last minute.”
“I didn’t have anything going on. And even if I had,” he shrugged, “I would’ve come.”
She nodded once, then pointed to the kitchen table. It technically had four chairs, but they had shoved the table against the wall to make more space, leaving one chair pinned against it. Evan surveyed the three seats and somehow unerringly picked the one that was usually unoccupied. When he sat down, the energy of the room shifted further into comfort. He no longer loomed like that, and became again a collection of limbs that didn’t always seem to agree with each other.
On a whim, she pulled down a box of Jammie Dodgers and put some on a plate, setting it before him.
“Thanks,” he gave her his crooked smile and she resisted the urge, as she had many times before, to ruffle his hair.
In general, Shruti didn’t touch people. In general, she didn’t want to.
Every generality had exceptions.
“I’m not sure when it started,” she admitted as she started the kettle. “But I noticed it about a week ago.”
“A creeping vine,” Evan repeated from her message. “Radiating a black light. Not the kind that’s actually ultraviolet, but deeply black.”
“Which should be impossible. Black is not a color light can be. I want you to know that I’m very annoyed about that.”
Evan didn’t laugh, but she caught the sparkle in his eye. “Your annoyance has been registered. I’ll tell the concepts of magic to knock it off.”
“You know if there was a place to file a formal complaint, I would be filling their inbox regularly.”
“I would be right behind you,” Evan assured her. “Have you seen anything like it before?”
“Once,” she said carefully.
“Okay,” Evan nodded. “Sounds like that was really bad.”
“Yes.”
He picked up one of the biscuits and took a bite, “Are you worried more information will contaminate my impressions or do you just not want to tell me?”
She sighed, “Yes.”
“Gotcha,” he didn’t seem offended. He rarely did. “Okay. Let’s have tea and then I can go take a look.”
“Your shadow isn’t already investigating?”
There was a slight flicker in his eyes, a look to the left that she had come to associate with communication out of her perception. If she lowered her glasses right now, the golden thread between him and his shadow would be vibrating. She didn’t lower them.
“No. It’s watching a bee right now,” he said, fondness leaking into his voice.
Shruti made them both lemongrass tea and finally sat down with him at the table. He had drifted forward a little, planting an elbow on the table and letting his chin rest in his palm. Maybe he too was watching the bee. She wasn’t sure how that worked.
“How do you deal with the magic in your home? Or how did you, before the glasses?” Evan asked after a long pause.
Of course. Of course.
And Shruti would be lying to herself if she hadn’t almost wanted this too.
“It’s familiar to me and not very strong,” she said.
“All right,” he finished the biscuit.
“That magic is the other black light,” she said quietly. “The one here. I’m not sure if they’re connected. The other has been here since the beginning, the vine is new.”
Evan's eyes found hers.
His gaze was a cool pond and sinking into it soothed her. Other people seemed to find it disconcerting, his steady unblinking stare. Shruti had watched students and professors alike squirm beneath it. Yet, she knew she was not alone in finding it a comfort. You had to be the kind of person that understood watchfulness, who knew what it was to cling to what you had with a tenacity that bordered on fanatical.
“Let's deal with it all after tea. How is Sam’s movie coming?”
It was a pathetic gambit, but luckily Evan liked talking about Sam too much to call it out. The new film had been written by Jammer, confessed to her in a whisper like other professors might be listening at the door to pass the word on to the tabloids.
Shruti liked Jammer very much. When he had reached out to her about the bachelor party, he had conveyed a certain pairing of irreverence and respect that she found appealing. In person, he had a force of personality that was hard to deny even when he was listening to other people talk. Aesthetically, he was beautiful, in the same way that Sam and K were beautiful and Evan was not. It was a beauty that had little to do with their actual looks, but some intrinsic combination of charisma and magic that detonated into glory.
“All right,” Evan brushed the crumbs from his hands onto the plate and brought the plate to the sink. “Vine?”
“This way.”
She led him back into the garden, passing his shadow which was drowsing like Benji in a sunbeam.
“It’s-” she started, but Evan was already darting forward and squatting down to evaluate the vine.
With her glasses on, it was only another invasive thread of ivy. She couldn’t even say what had possessed her to take them off to look at the garden. Well. Maybe her palm had tingled a little.
Shruti had gone forty-five years with no religion and she wasn’t sure how she liked being backed into one now.
“What are you?” Evan muttered. He reached forward, but didn’t touch the vine, only hovered his hand a few inches away. Then he hissed. “Oh, you are a piece of work, huh?”
“What is it?”
“Mm. I think I need a consultation. Do you mind if K drops in?”
In for a penny. "They can come."
K did not fit into the scene of Shruti's poorly managed garden. The sheer absurdity of their vinyl laminated presence among the wilds of overgrown lavender was charming.
“It’s definitely got some kind of spy thing going on,” they said. They lacked all of Evan's careful paranoia and were fully holding onto the vine now and giving it a little shake. “It’s watching, but I don’t know for what.”
“Maybe it’s not looking for this place in particular,” Evan started to follow the vine down the wall. “Disappears under the garden wall here.”
“Are your neighbors jerks and if so, are they home right now?” K asked Shruti.
“They’re unpleasant and also absent,” she provided.
“Perfect,” K grinned at her.
In a very practiced move, K jogged toward the wall as Evan ducked down and made a sling of his hands. They jumped and he boosted them up and over. They landed on the other side with a quiet thump.
“I don't see it here!” They declared after a few minutes. “Give it a tug!”
Evan reached out and wrapped a hand around the vine, touching it for the first time. His face screwed up in distaste, but he did give it a good hard tug. An acrid smell filled the air.
“Anything?” Evan called back.
“Nada!” The air next to Evan shivered and K stood beside him again. “We could try to unearth it, figure out where it’s rooted?”
“Maybe,” Evan lay down flat into the dirt. Shruti resigned herself to losing some foxglove. “I think it’s coming straight out of the wall though.”
“Really?” K squatted down beside him, taking out their phone to shine a light where he was pointing.
It was much the same feeling as hovering over the plumber last time the shower had acted up. Interesting, in the way that all experts were interesting, but good at making you feel as useful as an extra thumb. She stayed anyway, watching the two of them speak in shorthand and likely do all kinds of magic.
“Good news first,” Evan stood, his plain gray t-shirt littered with brown and green stains. “It’s not actively doing much except recording. Bad news, we don’t know for whom or why.”
“Whom,” K repeated, with a sly sideways look.
“It’s grammatically accurate,” Evan rolled his eyes.
“You’ve lived here too long,” they snorted. “Okay, so like, my working theory here is that some smart cookie mage has figured out how to make little organic spy cams. Good to find out and we can probably get rid of it now that we know it’s here.”
“We definitely can, if you don’t care about us setting fire to your garden,” Evan said, “but if you do care, it’ll take us longer.”
“I care,” Shruti said, raising her eyebrows. “I'm renting. No fires.”
“Gotcha,” K nodded. “Okay, let me go figure out some magic weed killer then. Evan said you might have more intel, but it’s his ears only?”
Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to let K into the house and tell them too, but there was only so much change one could allow in a day.
“For now,” Shruti decided.
“You got it. It was nice seeing you, Professor!” They were gone again, leaving a photo negative impression of themselves behind for a heartbeat.
“Sorry it’s not a quick fix,” Evan shifted his weight a little.
“I didn’t expect one and it’s not bothering me per se. I’m not sure what it could be catching in the garden.”
“We shouldn’t keep talking in front of it,” Evan said.
Shruti led the way back into the house. She turned her back on him to get there, and by the time he stepped back inside, the dirt and stains were gone. Sometimes, he made magic seem appealing in a way she had rejected for a long time.
She poured them both another cup of tea before resettling at the kitchen table.
“I haven’t put the story to words before,” she said. “It’s a bit of his story too and I don’t know these pieces. I don’t know what he’ll tell you.”
Curiosity lit in Evan’s eyes. The mysterious other in Shruti’s life, inferred in many places, but never spoken of directly must’ve baited his hungry mind endlessly.
“My brother left for Gowpenny when I was four years old. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. When you told me about the memory spells, it answered a great deal of riddles.”
“I had no idea,” Evan said with a hint of admiration.
“I didn’t either until...well,” she gave him a tight smile. “Let me tell it in order, if I can.”
“I’m listening.”
__
Imagine if you can, a small girl, who sometimes sees things from the corner of her eyes. She’s alone more than in company. Her parents are distant figures, giants moving in the mist. Her brother is older than her by seven years and in their earliest days, he tends to her in his clumsy childish ways. He’s the one that tells her jokes and sneaks her forbidden candies. For a four year old girl, he is often the only real person in the world.
The week of her fifth birthday, he leaves for boarding school and reality becomes a little less real.
With all her young heart, the girl believes that she too will be whisked away one day. She thinks the things she sees (gleaming auras that shatter light the same way her mother’s pearl necklace does. Very early she learns the word ‘pearlescent’, another tool in her overdeveloped vocabulary that she wields only internally) might have to do with where he goes, but the relationship is tenuous and hard to prove. So hard that when she brings it up, all she gets are doctor visits and a prescription.
At this point, magic in the mundane world is rare, she sees the pearlescent aura infrequently. It stays consistantly in some places, lingering at certain doorways on her walk to school, traced around a statue posed in the town square, and one particularly large crow that lingers outside the bakery.
It's also always around her brother when he comes home to visit. He does not listen when she tells him this. The older he gets, the less he listens to her at all. Home from breaks, he bestows on her small treats, a few moments of his attention, and little else.
The girl believes her brother loves her, in the way she believes her parents love her: an ambient fact that makes little difference in her life. She’s excellent at school, less excellent at making friends, but not abysmal. She has a best friend, Isha, who’s parents are warm and giving and accept their daughter’s cold friend into their home, thawing her out with homemade meals and board games.
The world is not kind, but it is also not cruel. The girl knows neither pain nor comfort in her own home. She studies, she plans, and she hopes. The year that she could go to school with her brother comes and goes. There is no mention of her joining him. When she asks, her parents seems gently bewildered. The boarding school invites you, and she has not been invited, so why would she go?
Her long-hoped for first year is his last and when her parents ask what he’ll do next, her brother says words that soothe them and mean nothing. His shining aura has taken on a yellow-ish tint that she does not like.
She tries to warn him. He gives her a hard look and warns her to be careful.
“Don’t go,” he says. “No matter what they offer you.”
“I see something around you,” she tells him, trying one last time. “It’s gone bad, sick.”
He laughed without humor and bent down (he’s gotten so tall, growing literally away from her). They are not a family that hugs. Instead, he meets her eyes.
“Remember me,” he tells her. “As hard as you can.”
Her brother disappears. There’s a letter, some explanation of a job across the sea. There are no calls, no trace and her parents do not mention him at all. The stilted family photos still contain him, his childhood tennis ribbons stay hung in the cases, and his bedroom remains untouched beside hers. He disappears only body, but her parents never mention him again.
When she says something to Isha and her parents, they are so kind about it. So kind and warm and sweet about how sad it is that the girl has to make up a sibling. So kind, the girl never mentions him again. Not to Isha, not to anyone.
But she does not forget.
Years pass and she keeps her promise. When at long last, she’s ready to leave her parents' house, she takes her last day to duck into his abandoned bedroom, dusty now as her parents walk by the door every day in their otherwise pristine house without noticing.
The room is messy with little boy things. Suspended in time long before he actually disappeared. She steals her way to his closet, checks under the bed and in drawers, not even sure what she looks for. She finds it anyway. Tucked away beneath an end table is a flat box. Sliding it out, she finds odd paper, too thick and the handwriting too pretty. Paperwork of a kind, written in archaic language. It takes her hours, but she pieces together a job offer. Work of a kind she doesn’t understand, has no context for. The signatures at the bottom gleam with the pearlescent aura. When she let's it go, it rolls up like a scroll.
There’s the scroll and nothing else, she squirrels it away and takes it with her though she cannot say why. The girl goes to college, she goes to graduate school and along the way without noticing, she becomes a woman. She is still excellent at academia and less excellent at making friends. Originally, she studied chemistry, the intricate workings of the building blocks of life. In class, the professor always knows the answers.
Then she takes a philosophy class, by accident, and the professor asks ‘what makes a person good?’ and there is no easy answer. There are only schools of thought and possibilities. The woman finds her home in questions. Uncertainty is her only certainty, and it fills her with confidence.
A year after she begins her first academic job, a body appears in her living room. Her flat is a postage stamp, but hers alone. She does not bring people back home. Only Isha has come in, though they are not as close as they once were. So the body is a surprise in every way.
It’s a man, his face a ruin, and a halo of blood around his head.
All of him, every last inch, pulses with pearlescent white, except for his head which throbs with a light that is also black which should not be possible.
The woman stands over it and she thinks ‘call an ambulance’ she thinks ‘this is impossible’ she thinks ‘this is bigger than you’.
She does not go get her phone. Instead, she kneels down and she finds features under terrible damage. It’s been nearly twenty years, but she has studied that face in pictures almost as many times as she’s looked in the mirror. She has kept one, stolen off the wall of her parents house, beside the television.
The face lies in ruins and she knows it still.
“It’s you,” she breathes out, feeling bound in her throat.
“Is it?” he asks back.
She fell backwards, startled. "What? How? You-"
“Name,” he says, his voice a raw scrape of pain. “Say my name.”
“Arun Bajaj,” she doesn’t have time to question, she knows that. Maybe it’s been a long time since she read fairy tales, but she remembers that names have power.
“Yes,” he whispers. “Arun. My name is Arun Bajaj. And you are...you’re my sister. I know you. My sister.”
“Yes,” She doesn’t know what to do with her hands, with any of herself. She should call for help.
“Shruti. Your name is Shruti. You’re twenty-eight years old and you got your doctorate in philosophy last year. You have a teaching job.”
“You kept track of me?” she asks, her voice shaking. “No, forget that, you’re injured. I think you might be dying. I have to call for help.”
“The spell can’t take root," he mumbled, "I remembered you and I came here and now it can’t keep burrowing. It tried to take memory, but it can’t because you’re here and I’m here.”
The woman, the girl really in this moment, sits there and thinks about the word ‘spell’ and ‘sister’ and ‘burrowing’ and none of them go together. Her whole life is a papercraft of words, a shell that protects her and now none of them make sense.
“I have to get you help.”
“You are the help. Just remember things. Say them. Tell me about who I am.”
The woman doesn’t remember much of who he was, but she tries her best. She tells him about hiding under the kitchen table during a thunderstorm and how he’s the only one that thought to look there. It’s her earliest memory, barely three and her big brother crammed himself beside her. She doesn’t remember how long they sat there or what they did, only that he did and that everything that came after brought her back to the tiny moment. That solidarity of two small people in a world of giants, hiding from the great thunder.
She tells him about watching from the window as he played with his friends, about the action figures that waged complicated wars in window sills, and the books that he’d left behind. She tells him about holding his hand as he led her from home to the wonders of the candy store as if it were a great adventure.
“Then you went away.”
“To Gowpenny,” he murmurs and actually does look less like he’s actually dying. The black light has retreated a little, the blood has stopped coming forth. She finally takes in what he’s wearing, long robes like a barrister in court. His shoes are strange too, the toes curled up at the ends. “What then?”
“I don’t know. You came home sometimes, but you were different. You didn’t have much time for me. And then you were gone.”
“That’s it? That’s the end?” he sounds desperate. “Is there nothing after that? Nothing at all?”
“You never came home again,” she protests. How could he crash land back in her life and demand memories he’d never seen fit to make? “No one believes me that you even existed!”
“But you believed.”
“You made me. You told me to,” and she is angry underneath sorrow and confusion. Maybe she’s always been a little angry that he laid that burden in her arms. “Because your room and your pictures are there! And I found that stupid scroll.”
His breathing catches, “What scroll? What did it say?”
“I have it,” she admits, “I kept it. It’s in my room.”
“Get it.”
The scroll has always sat in her end table drawer, a quiet mirror to where it was found. She rushes back and pushes away the absurdity of this. Her lost brother, bleeding on the floor and she’s brandishing a piece of paper. Like always. A sword of worthless words.
“Read it to me,” he asks, “please.”
She reads the job offer. She’s a little older now and more of the words make sense. Or, as she has to admit even in this dire moment, she lets it make more sense.
Arun Bajaj was once offered a job in Montreal. They needed a spellcrafter, but they needed them discreetly. The salary means nothing to her, even now, listed in a money system she doesn’t know. She hopes it was good. There’s mostly contractual language about relocation, promises of benefits that seem both mundane (uniforms provided) and ones she cannot comprehend. There is a codicil about memory, like a non-compete clause turned into an ancient horror.
“Does that help?” she asks. “Is this helping? You need a doctor.”
“The signature. Who signed besides me?”
“It’s hard to read,” she tries, the script slants so much the letters melt one into the other. “I think- Reed. Reed Thistledown Ombonus.”
The black light went out, Arun exhaled shakily. “Yes. Yes, that was it. That absolute piece of shit. Reed. Reed Thistledown Ombonus. Well. At least he’s dead.”
“Hospital,” she says, tossing the scroll to the table. “Can I take you to the hospital now?”
Arun cannot answer her. He’s passed out. She makes the call.
It’s both easier and harder than it could have been. They find a wallet on him that has old, but credible IDs. She can prove she’s his sister with a little finagling. Doctors tell her things gravely in hallways and ask her questions that she doesn’t know how to answer. She settles on something close to the truth: he was in trouble and injured and he must’ve remembered her address and come to her in a state of shock. She does not know what happened. They haven’t spoken in some time.
There are surgeries and consults and bafflement all around. By the time he wakes again, she has a thousand questions. They die in her mouth as he says, unerringly despite the fact that he certainly cannot see her,
“I’m sorry. The blood must've been hard to get out of the rug."
The stain had kept her up for hours, something concrete she could work at. "I managed."
"You don't have to manage. I know this fell on you. It's over, the hard work. You can forget now.”
“Do you have somewhere to go?”
“No.”
“Then you come home with me.”
Their parents are gone. Not dead. They returned to Ludhiana, the city of their birth, to retire when her father’s father passed on. They call once a month with questions so predictable they might as well be scripted. She does not tell them that their son has come home.
She buys a pull out sofa from a friend of a friend and sleeps on that while he has her bed. She buys him new clothes and against all reason, throws the ones he was wearing into a bonfire some students illegally start in the woods. It’s a tradition stretching back years and she knows where to find them. They don’t know what to make of one of their professors emerging from the shadows to dispose of bloody clothes. Luckily they are all drunk and none of them believe each other in the morning.
There is no trace of the pearlescent aura left in her apartment and none left on her brother. She was always superstitious about touching it and now when she does see it, she gives it a wide berth. The black light clings to Arun's face, but she doesn't have to look him in the eye.
She has a thousand questions. She does not ask them. He does not answer. It's clear his memory was not wholly unaffected and in the few times they speak of the past, glaring gaps arise where he can only lapse into silence. Sometimes he’s not sure where he is even in the present, but that happens less and less as he learns to negotiate the world anew. She helps where she can. There’s technology that he doesn’t understand, but adapts to quickly. On his thirty-eighth birthday, he gets a full time job that lets him work from home.
“We need a bigger place,” she says instead of ‘Please don’t leave me again’.
“I can pay half.”
They have their own lives. They’re adults, after all. He likes to wake up early and she will always be a night owl. They eat dinner together once or twice a week, discuss the news or work, and the running of their small household. Sometimes, she thinks they are strangers to each other and other times that she has loved no other person as much as she loves him.
When magic releases on the world in a tsunami, she spends two long months barely able to open her eyes outside and too queasy to eat much. It’s only luck (or as she later learns, matching school schedules) that it occurs over the summer when she has less work to do. Arun tends to her as she once tended to him, ferrying her to doctor’s appointments and bringing her tea and toast.
“It’s everywhere,” she says over and over.
“I know,” he says and she’s not sure he does, but it’s a comfort not to be denied. “I know.”
It drains away in time for classes to start, a slow dispersal until it’s barely there again. The relief replaces sense and she does not ask.
Hypocrisy for a woman who lives inside of questions, but she forgives herself this human frailty as much as she berates herself for it.
Then magic returns in a thousand colors and textures all at once on a Wednesday afternoon. Poor luck this time, she had had a busy afternoon and left work late. She’s on a bus and the world explodes. Explodes only to her. Her fellow passengers witness her staggering out at a stop she doesn't recognize and they must believe her drunk or high.
She gropes her way home by luck and persistence, evading starbursts and roiling storms around people’s heads. The streets themselves undulate with the flow of freed power. When she finally makes it home, it’s to head right to the bathroom where she vomits then slumps to the floor.
Arun comes from his room at the sound. He sits beside her in the cool dark of the bathroom.
“It came back,” she says in horror.
“It came back,” he says in relief.
She learns to weave her way through a world with too much stimulus. She does not touch it. She cannot bear to touch it. She is not a person made to touch.
Magic is on the news now. She does not watch the news.
She teaches her students how to think, she challenges them, she gives them the great works of great minds and says ‘what if they are wrong?’ ‘what do you think?’ ‘what makes this so?’ ‘what if you’re wrong about everything you ever thought?’
She believes in them and their power to overcome their own doubts and answer their own questions. She knows, some day, she’ll have to believe in herself too.
A green fog rolls into her classroom, it lingers at the very back and she does not look at it because she has become so good at not asking and not looking.
It comes back for the next session, wrapped around a boy. She would prefer not to look at him, but he makes her. He demands her attention with whip smart questions, with a keenness to know. He makes her look at him and he does not mean to do it.
It takes too many years, but Shruti Bajaj finally looks magic in the face. Evan Butler née Kelmp looks back.
__
“I’m sorry, “ Evan said when she was done.
Her tea had gone cold, but she took a sip anyway. “What for?”
“Maybe you’d be happier if you never met me. You could’ve gone on not knowing.”
“No, dear boy,” she said. “Denying it was eroding me. It’s always better to know. And certainly it’s better for me to have known you.”
It was twilight now, but even in the waning light she could see the unbridled joy that brought him. He was so easily pleased. It was as sweet as it was heartbreaking. How could she regret finding him?
“Right, okay,” he ran a hand over his hair. “I think I have to meet your brother.”
“Yes. You do.”
No. There were no regrets. Even if she was afraid.