The girl in the mirror had her father's face.
Lily had known it the way you know a fact without feeling it. People said so at holidays, and Aunt Estella said it most, touching her chin and going soft around the eyes. This morning was different. Her hair sat half-pinned, the light came white and level through the tall windows, and when she looked up he was there. The line of the jaw. The straight dark brows. She had grown up on that face. A wall of framed photographs, hours of old home video, a father she could have picked out of any crowd and had almost no memory of being carried by. Gone since she was four. Surfacing now in her own face at fourteen, alive and moving in a way no photograph had ever managed.
She held there and let it be true for a second. Then Lexx put a chair on the floor the loud way.
"It wasn't me," he said, from directly on top of the evidence.
