There’s a lump in my throat. “He’s not mine to share.”
“I think he might be, actually. Oh, that little— Penny, you need a hat! You can’t be in the sun like that!”
“Levi said I could!”
Levi lifts one eyebrow, clearly having said no such thing. Penny sullenly stalks to her mother, only to stop in front of me with a shy, hesitant look.
“Does that hurt?” she asks, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
“What— Oh, my nose piercing. Just a tiny bit when I first got it, many years ago.”
She nods skeptically. “Is your name really Bee?”
“It is.”
“Like the bug?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
Levi and I laugh. Lily covers her eyes with a hand.
“My mom was a poet, and she really liked a set of poems about bees.”
Penny nods. Apparently, it makes as much sense to her as it did to Maria DeLuca-Königswasser. “Where’s your mom?”
“Gone, now.”
“Oh. My daddy’s gone, too.” I can feel the tension in the adults, but there’s something matter-of-fact about the way Penny talks. “What’s your favorite animal?”
“Will you be disappointed if I don’t say bees?”
She mulls it over. “Depends. Not if it’s a good one.”
“Okay. Are cats good?”
“Yes! They’re Levi’s favorite, too. He has a black kitty!”
“That’s right,” Levi interjects. “And Bee has a kitty, too. A see-through one.”
I glare at him.
“My favorite animals are spiders,” Penny informs me.
“Oh, spiders are, um”—I suppress a shudder—“cool, too. My sister’s favorite animals are blobfish. Have you ever seen one?”
Her eyes widen, and she climbs on my lap to look at the picture I’m pulling up on my phone. God, I love children. I love this child. I look up and notice the way Levi’s staring at me with an odd light in his eyes.
“Is your sister a child?” Penny asks after making a face at the blobfish.
“She’s my twin.”
“Really? Does she look like you?”
“Yep.” I scroll to my favorites and tap on a picture of the two of us at fifteen, before I started what Reike calls my “journey of soft-core body modification.” “Wow! Which one is you?”
“On the right.”