By the bike sheds, a boy—older, with a hard, mocking face—had a girl pinned against the brickwork. He was laughing, a sound like glass breaking in a bin, and his hand was gripped tight on her wrist. The girl was small, her face pale with a terror that Mama recognized instantly. It was the look of someone realizing the world wasn't a safe place.

"Let her go," she said, her voice sounding strange to her own ears—lower, colder, like the stone of the cottage.

The boy looked up, his sneer deepening as he saw a seventeen-year-old girl with a slight bump and a messy bun. "Get lost, sweetheart. This doesn't concern you."

"I said let her go." She didn't move. She felt a strange, humming vibration in her chest, a sense of the walls inside her shifting, as if a different part of the house was suddenly coming into the light. The boy took a step toward her, his face turning red, his free hand balling into a fist. He loomed over her, the smell of stale cigarettes and aggression filling her space. He raised his hand, the movement slow and deliberate, a threat meant to make her flinch.

She didn't flinch. She looked him straight in the eye, and for a second, the world went silent. She felt a sudden, sharp pull, like a thread being yanked from a tapestry. The cold of the brick, the smell of the rain, the boy's angry face—it all began to smear together into a grey, rushing tunnel.

And then, the lights went out.

The world came back in pieces.

First, it was the sound of water—a slow, rhythmic lapping against stone. Then, the smell of wet earth and rotting leaves. Finally, the cold. It was a deep, bone-settling chill that made her teeth chatter.

She blinked, her vision clearing slowly. She wasn't at the college. She wasn't by the bike sheds. She was standing on the towpath of the canal, nearly two miles away. The fog was thicker here, clinging to the dark surface of the water. Her knuckles were sore, and there was a smear of something dark on the sleeve of her coat.

She checked her watch, but the numbers didn't make sense. Two hours were gone. Just... erased.

A wave of visceral, sickening loneliness crashed over her. It wasn't just that I was in Sweden; it was that she felt like a stranger in her own skin. She sat down on the damp grass, her knees pulled up to her chest, and let out a sob that tore through the quiet of the canal. She felt shattered—not like a glass that had fallen once, but like a mirror that had been broken, glued back together, and broken again.

What if I'm not there when she's born? she thought, her hand pressing hard against her stomach. What if I drift away and someone else is holding her?