It’s very hard to gain the trust of the teenager inside Bellamy’s head. He’s traumatized and mistrustful, and shows Ciel hostility each time he comes around. Although it’s difficult to not take this personally, it’s important to be patient. Not too long ago, Ciel began attending therapy sessions with Bellamy on her request. This helps them in different ways. “He’s angry and hostile, but he saved my life,” says Bellamy about Tin, when he lashes out at Ciel for a perceived threat, or starts fights in an attempt to draw him away. “Be nice to him.”

Tin likes science fiction and music. Sometimes he reminds Ciel of Ivo.

Zoya is twenty one years old, and dresses in black when she’s not pretending to be someone else. It’s strange. It feels, a lot of the time, like Ciel is dating multiple people. He supposes, in a way, he is. Zoya is different from Bellamy in ways that most people don’t pick up on. It takes more effort and communication than the average relationship. Weeks ago, Bellamy shared her boundaries for their relationship. Every day, Ciel gets a little better at communicating with everyone individually.

“I had a trauma dream.”

Zoya likes him in the same way Bellamy does - but she’s young, and it took a while to open up to the possibility of a relationship with her. Bellamy calls her apparently normal part, like herself. Ciel spends most of his free time trying to understand how her brain works. Zoya lies in bed beside him, having woken him very early in the morning. She never falls asleep quickly. There’s no telling where Bellamy went, or when she’ll be back. Sometimes, Zoya says, parts stay dormant for years.

Ciel’s half asleep. “Do you want to talk about it?”

His sisters have been texting him all week. After enough ignored messages, they always eventually give up. He should be happy and relieved to know that Juno isn’t dead. Maybe it’s selfish not to be. The most ordinary adults get a second chance at life, and little children stay dead.

His trailer is a mess. Further down the park, there’s a forest that Zoya loves getting lost inside. She hugs him from behind, her sleep shirt itchy on his back. She has quirks that would seem strange to most people. He never points them out. She stops on the side of the highway to poke at roadkill with sticks, and ventures out late at night to meditate in cemeteries, and always dresses head to toe in black. She says it makes her feel calm and comforted, and brings her peace with death. Alters can’t die. They just go dormant for months or years at a time.

“I’m just glad you’re still here. I thought for sure someone would have scared you off by now.” It’s cold. Zoya doesn’t often feel cold, and sleeps in a thin tee shirt and shorts. She’s more adventurous than Bellamy, but not quite as expressive. Her hands are warm and sweaty, holding him very tightly. He doesn’t mind this. It’s been a while since he’s had someone to keep him company at night. There are times that feel like it would be easier to give up and move on - and maybe it would. It’s not supposed to be easy, he’s learned. Every relationship has its challenges. It’s just a matter of figuring out which people are worth overcoming challenges for.

“I’m hard to scare.”

He turns. It’s so hard, sometimes, to make sense of subtle details. Bellamy says it takes a lot of trust: and this is the hardest part. Ciel spends a lot of time at Bellamy’s house. This is her safe space, she says: the only place she feels fully comfortable to be herself. She has an angel in her system called Jesper, who only speaks inside her head, and isn’t known to anybody else.

Once Zoya wakes up, she can’t get back to sleep. Her mind is too full, she says, of memories. After a nightmare, she always wakes loudly, gasping, sweating. Bellamy is the same way. Sometimes, when Ciel is still up, he wakes her before a nightmare hits. Zoya plays with his hair, one arm wrapped around his waist. He loves Bellamy. He tries hard to love Zoya, too.

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“You never try to fix us,” said Bellamy, “you just do your best to love and understand us, and that’s the most anyone has ever done.”

One night, after a stupid, late-night argument, Maria went out with friends, leaving Ciel in charge of putting Calypso to bed. This was something he enjoyed - and they had a routine. He’d tell her a bedtime story, and then tuck all of her favorite stuffed animals into bed with her before saying goodnight. She was afraid of the dark, and insects. She giggled at all of Ciel’s stupidest jokes.

“Daddy?” she said one night, staring up at him from underneath her pink princess blanket. It was late. When Maria was out, he always let her stay up past her bedtime. “Do you and Mommy still love each other?”

Calypso didn’t understand adult topics. She loved everyone in the same way.

When he didn’t tuck her in, she couldn’t sleep. Sometimes he snuck into her room when she was sleeping and crawled into her bed.

“Why wouldn’t we?”

Children are smart, as much as some people want to think otherwise. Children perceive and understand things that adults aren’t even aware of, and it shapes their whole lives. Calypso sat up, her night-light casting shadows across her face. She was a cheerful little girl, but she picked up on other people’s feelings, and this was a detriment in the end. “You argue all the time. Mommy goes out for a long time.”

It’s hard to explain relationships to children. We argue over things we care about, with people who mean something to us. It was always better to be overly passionate than not to care at all. Like her mother, Calypso could silence him with just a look. Maria was a woman who could have single-handedly raised a warrior: and maybe, in some other universe, that’s exactly what she’s doing.

Each time Ciel hugged his daughter, she nuzzled into him. He misses this. “Arguing isn’t always a bad thing,” he said, although he wasn’t sure this was true. “It means you care about something.” It’s hard to explain this to a child: even one as smart as Calypso. Over the course of his relationship, he questioned once or twice if he was with Maria out of love or out of loneliness. It’s probably a normal thing to wonder, but it always made him feel guilty.

Calypso was born in June, a day after Ciel argued with Maria. They argued a lot. They always had sex to solve their problems, and it never solved anything.

“You seem sad. What are you thinking about?”

Things never turn out the way you expect them to. You could plan your future down to the last detail, and end up somewhere as far away from it as possible. Even the people you love turn out to be someone different.

“It’s her birthday.”

Everybody knows about Calypso. She’s been written about more than once in Bellamy’s system notebook. There’s a picture of her inside Ciel’s wallet. Sometimes, the littles draw pictures of her. Inside the system, there’s a caretaker named Star, whom Ciel has never met. Bellamy talks little about the others.

Zoya sits on her knees, playing with his hair. For a long time after the accident, it was hard for Ciel to understand that he still deserved to feel loved. The hardest part of any accident is forgiving yourself. Some days, he’s still convinced all of it was his fault. How should he be allowed to continue living when no one else did?

Zoya means well. Sometimes, she’s just not very good at reading the room. “Who?”

“Calypso. She would have been nine.”

Has it been that long already? It feels like yesterday she was giggling at a silly joke she told.

Anika used to say that the ones we love never really leave us, and maybe that’s true. They’ll always be in our hearts, she’d say, as if this makes up for watching them die. It sounds undesirable: hanging around after death, trapped in the same place you’ve been your whole life, forbidden from moving on even in death. If there’s an afterlife, Ciel would hate to end up there.

“Come watch a movie with me,” Zoya says, holding out her hand. “Maybe it will cheer you up a little.” She doesn’t smile. She tells jokes with a straight face, leaving Ciel uncertain if it’s okay to laugh. Like Bellamy, Zoya struggles to understand herself, sitting on the floor in the corner of her room, curling her knees up to her chest to stare into space. Every night, when the sun goes down, she sits outside underneath the sky for a very long time.