The Surrogate’s Blade
But not on the spacing it used before.
This time the knocks come on a different rhythm, slower, with a particular uneven gap between the second and the third, and the cold that floods me when I hear it is the worst of the whole night, because I know that rhythm too.
It is not the count my father taught me. It is my heartbeat. My exact heartbeat, the small private skip I have had since I was a girl, the flaw in my own pulse that no monitor reads and no person has ever heard.
It is knocking my heart back at me. It has been close enough, for long enough, to learn the one rhythm I never taught anyone.
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