"Don't you dare die on me, Lila—you're my baby!" Maggie slapped the bedside rail like a judge dropping a gavel. Her voice broke on the last word. Lila opened her eyes on a ceiling that smelled faintly of boiled cabbage and old smoke. Sunlight leaked through a threadbare curtain in a stripe across the wall. The room was small. The bed squeaked when she shifted. A chipped dresser sat under a cracked mirror. A metal lamp clung to the nightstand, its pull-string frayed. "Maggie?" Lila's voice came out thin. The name sounded wrong in her mouth—so small, so foreign. "You're talking." Maggie sobbed with something that sounded like triumph and terror mixed into one. She grabbed Lila's hand, the way a desperate woman grabs a lifeline. "There you are. Oh Lord." Tommy pressed his face to the mattress at Lila's knees, eyes huge. He was five, all elbows and earnestness. "My Lila," he whispered. He sounded like he meant it in a way that made Lila's chest tighten. She tried to sit up and the world pitched. Her ribs protested like she’d boxed with a freight train and lost. Memory hit like a wave—her last life: arena lights, the sting of a corner man's slap, the taste of sweat and copper and victory. Then hospital fluorescents, tubes, the blurred collapse. Then the impossible—a book she'd read as a kid, the story that wasn’t supposed