The cold in the kitchen was specific. Not winter cold. The cold of something that doesn't generate heat because heat requires life, and whatever was standing three feet from me, wearing my father's face, had never been alive in any sense I had language for.
I knew it was the fifth version. The pivot. Sera had described fourteen iterations, and I had been bracing for the catalogue, the slow grinding through versions of my father until it found the one that broke me. What I hadn't prepared for was the entity changing the game entirely. Dropping the offer. Picking up something that looked, from the outside, like honesty.
That was smarter than the grief approach.
Because grief, I could work with. I knew grief. I'd been managing it since I was seven. But the possibility that the thing I'd be
