Every time Briony stole a baby, she promised herself it’d be her last. Her last infant, her last toddler, her last tween. She’d learned that word, ‘tween,’ from Camilla, her last daughter. God, how she missed Camilla! Her soft brown eyes, her crooked little smile, her outrageous warmth… But it didn’t do to dwell. What had the past ever done for her? 

Briony didn’t age, couldn’t die. Lord knew she’d tried. Suicide attempts were part of her routine, after all. She couldn’t bear her own children, at least not anymore. She’d bedded enough strange men in dark places to be certain of this. Her beauty was a curse. Her three centuries crossing the earth were a torment greater than the seventh circle of hell. There were days she believed that she was the loneliest being in all creation. 

The babies were the only things that kept her going. Maybe they weren’t hers to start, but eventually, they became hers. 

It had been months since she’d let Camilla go, and lately she’d taken to wandering again. She’d pulled off at the Chevron outside Des Moines not because she needed gas, but because something had drawn her there. And the moment she glimpsed him in his tattered pram, his blue eyes wide with fascination as he watched a crow peck at the overflowing rubbish bin, she knew that he was meant to be hers. Owen. That would be his new name. 

Owen’s other mother was in the back seat rummaging through a bag. Briony noted the car’s rusty fender and the small avalanche of aged fast food containers spilling out of the open door with maternal disapproval. Didn’t she know that it was dangerous to leave a baby unattended in a parking lot? Something terrible could happen to him.

Owen was a few months old, a dark-haired cherub with ruddy cheeks. Just like Percival… But no, not a Percival. She had never seen another Percival. Not since the accident. Then Owen smiled at her, and she banished the poisonous thought. Owen…of course he was an Owen. How could she resist? 

An instant was all she’d ever needed. She took him into her arms, and it was done. She was miles away by the time Owen’s other mother’s voice raised in a screech of pain and fear. Despite her fierce joy, Briony felt a pang of sorrow for the woman. She too knew the agony of lost children.

But this time she’d get it right. She would make everything perfect for Owen, then she could die and be reunited with Percival.

***

Owen’s seventeen years passed in a cruel blink. Briony pretended to celebrate the passage of time, but she mourned each birthday, each growth spurt, each change. Briony the individual ceased to exist. During this time, she was only Mother. There was no child on earth more tenderly cared for than hers. 

But eventually, he grew up. When he was old enough to wonder why they moved around so much, smart enough to notice that she wasn’t aging like other women, the cycle ended as it always must. She faked her death and sent him off, broken-hearted, into a future without her. 

She had rules, despite her many moral gray areas. She would only take children from mothers she deemed unfit. She could steal, but only to secure the child’s future. She could lie, but only to protect the baby. She could grieve, but she had to move on. She never forgot a single one of the chubby-cheeked children that marched through her mind night after night: Owen-Camilla-Noah-Therese-Caitriona-Dougal-Claudia-Marcel-Pietro-Delphine-Clark-Flora-David-Beatrice-Emil-Georges-Margareutte-Tiberius-Anatoly-Helena-

Percival.

Percival had been her first—her only natural baby. His death had mangled her heart beyond function. That was why she’d gotten into the baby-stealing game to begin with. Without her heart, she couldn’t die. It was like some kind of punishment for failing the first time, for losing her son. She didn’t understand how or why she was afflicted with this strange immortality, but her curiosity had waned with the centuries. She drank no blood and feared no crucifix. She craved nothing but a child to dote upon.

And she was alone once again.

***

Flowers. The extra place setting. Had anyone picked up the oysters? They’d better not have forgotten to iron the linens.

“For the love of God, Camilla,” said Alexei, her long-suffering and obviously irritated massage therapist. “Relax. I shouldn’t have to work this hard to loosen you up.”

“Sorry,” Camilla said, and even felt a little guilty. “I’m trying.” 

“Don’t try,” he said. “Just do.” 

Camilla Rowley-York had a million things to do before the dinner party tonight, an intimate gathering of her and Henry’s closest friends to celebrate his most recent promotion at the agency. And Alexei didn’t get it, couldn’t get it. Just relax? She wished.

She was exhausted; it had been non-stop this month. First, there was that bris for Simon’s tiny babe. (Why did people gather to watch that?) Next, Agathe had insisted they fly to Vegas for her 36^th, and she wasn’t about to miss the fun, was she? Then, it was dinners with the partners at Henry’s agency, cocktails with the wives, and they’d still have to make time for their friends. And the outfits! She’d considered hiring a stylist, but Camilla had a reputation for her impeccable taste, and she wasn’t about to let anyone else take credit for it.

But she’d relented for tonight. Their Bel Air mansion wasn’t equipped to host a sit-down dinner for thirty-two people, and it hadn’t taken much arm-twisting from Henry to outsource it. Still, she worried about the finer details. Like the flowers. And the extra place settings. And the—

“Camilla,” Alexei said. “Chill the fuck out.”

“Chilling,” she said. She closed her eyes and thought about her mother, the physical embodiment of perfection, who could’ve thrown this dinner and finished her taxes and juggled knives at the same time, all without furrowing her perfectly smooth brow. God, Camilla missed her. Briony the Wise, Briony the Beautiful. She had been killed in an accident when Camilla was just eighteen, but she’d left Camilla with more money than she could ever spend and an airtight plan for her future. She wished she could have one more conversation with her mother, especially now that she was—

But she couldn’t bear to think the word. Not today. Not after the miscarriages, the many rounds of IVF. Not when her hopes were a glass balloon, a sugar-spun egg, brittle and delicate and practically designed to shatter.

***

Briony watched Owen from afar as he grieved her and began to make his own way in the world. She needed to make sure he was okay before she really left him. Foolish hope kindled within her. Maybe this time it would work. 

A handful of sleeping pills and a sharp knife against her wrists, praying to a God that she no longer believed in for redemption. A murmured hymn of her children’s names. Yearning like agony, a desire so deep that her skin should surely burst like an overripe berry and finally send her off into eternity.

As she drifted in between life and death, she sometimes thought she could feel Percival’s warmth in her arms. “Mother has you,” she said in her old tongue, the one that she’d worked so hard to unlearn. But each time she tried to clutch him tighter, some invisible hand plucked him away, just like the first time, the only time that mattered.

And then she was back on the beach again, and oh God please anywhere but there, and she was as young and beautiful as ever. Too beautiful for her own good, the village had whispered, but her beauty had at least delivered some good with the bad in the form of her perfect, healthy son. So what if she’d been ostracized? So what if her family turned away from her at the market? She had Percival, and he was all she’d ever needed. 

Mornings they went down to the water’s edge and watched the tiny creatures that had gotten trapped overnight in the tide pools. Percival loved to peer in at them and wiggle his little fingers through the water, enticing the curious fish to come suckle. He was a year old now, with sturdy legs that wanted to run and strong hands that wanted to yank, to grab. Sometimes he had more energy than she knew what to do with. Sometimes she was so tired from being up with him all night. Sometimes it was too much for her alone.

Just one time did she lay her weary head down upon the sand. She hadn’t meant to doze off, but the day had been so warm, and Percival had been playing quietly beside her. She must have closed her eyes, though she didn’t remember. She must have slept, for when she woke up, he was gone. Vanished into thin air, or to be more accurate, into the inexorably crashing waves, the bitter sea that came at her again and again as she ran heedlessly into the water, screaming his name. 

When his limp body washed ashore two days later, two days of waking nightmare, of sleepless vigil on the beach, of letting the sun crack her skin and the night chill her bones, only then did she walk into the waves to join her sweet boy. Which, of course, was when she discovered that she couldn’t die. That there would be no release for one as unworthy as her.

***

Hours later, gasping for air, Briony awoke in a bathtub full of her blood. For a moment, she thought she could taste the sea, but it was just salt from the tears drying on her cheeks. Her wrists were already healed and unblemished, her heart whole but unbeating. Death would not become her. 

Despair descended. She threw herself into fresh pursuits: capoeira, deep sea fishing, nuclear physics. She made it one month, then another. She saw babies in prams, kids on playgrounds, tiny toddlers waving their fat little fists, and though she felt the pain of her empty arms, she resisted the urge to take. To steal. To mother. 

She was cured.

She was lost.

Her mind wandered. Owen-Camilla-Noah-Therese-Caitriona-Dougal-

She was made to mother.

She began drifting around the country again, roaming the back roads, telling herself she was just restless. She wasn’t looking for another baby. But she recognized the pattern and knew she was lying to herself. 

She broke her rules and used the internet to check on Owen. He was doing well, off at Harvard just like she’d planned. Her pride flared, a brief respite from the ache. She thought about searching for Camilla, her sweet, brave girl—she’d be a woman now, perhaps with babies of her own—but managed to stop herself. It never helped to pick at old wounds.

She traveled faster now, hopscotching through the Rockies—Coeur d’Alene to Missoula, Jackson to Grand Junction—fleeing whenever she heard a baby’s cry. St. George to Pahrump to Visalia. Solvang to Oxnard to Thousand Oaks. Wandering, seeking, avoiding. Just another addict on the run from her fix.

This time would be different. This time she’d finally get it right.

***

Camilla thought she’d known true happiness, but she now knew that everything that came before her baby boy—her Percival—had been a cheap substitute for joy. The knock-off Chanel bag of delight. Diet bliss. She could growl with contentment. Henry thought it was ridiculous, but she had wanted to name the baby after her half-brother, the one that her mother had always mourned. He’d died before Camilla was born, a victim of some tragic accident. Her mother could hardly bear to speak his name.

“Percival,” Camilla cooed. The baby lit up, smiled a gummy smile at her, and she was lost. He was six months old that day. She tickled Percival as she dressed him, kissed his tiny eyebrows, and laughed when he laughed. She felt like a bottle of shaken soda, bubbly and frothy. Effervescent. She wished her mother could see her. She knew that Briony would approve. Camilla felt like she’d been made for motherhood. 

She drove carefully with Percival strapped in his car seat to the Malibu Country Mart to pick up a cake for the baby’s half-birthday. As she parked, she murmured nonsense words to make him smile. She got out of the car, put him into his stroller, and turned around to grab the diaper bag, just for an instant—

But then the siren that was her heart began to wail. She turned back in time to see a familiar dark-haired beauty lean down and take Percival into her arms.

She heard the woman whisper his name.

Her heart shuddered to a stop.

“Mother?” Camilla asked.

It couldn’t be, it was impossible, and yet Camilla knew it was her, knew it like some inescapable truth. Briony the Beautiful, Briony the Supposed-to-be-Dead. The woman went preternaturally still. She looked at Camilla, then back at the baby in her arms. 

“Mom?” Camilla asked uncertainly. “Is it…how could it be…you?”

Briony clutched Percival even more tightly. She turned away from Camilla, her body tense. 

“His name is Percival,” Camilla said, the words tumbling out. She was hardly aware that she spoke, fear and gladness and adrenaline gripping her ribs and threatening to open her like a book. Her mother was dead. Her mother was here, not a day older than the last time Camilla had seen her, on the day she’d died nineteen years ago. 

“Percival,” Briony breathed again, looking down into the baby’s eyes.

“I named him after my brother,” Camilla said. “He died when he was just a baby.” With shaking hands, she reached toward the woman who couldn’t be her mother.

***

This was all going wrong, terribly wrong. The baby in her arms was Percival; she’d know those perfect rosy cheeks and dark curls anywhere. But his other mother had seen her and was talking to her. She wanted the woman to stop. She didn’t want to hear! Didn’t she understand that Briony was doing this for her, too? To save her from Briony’s own terrible fate, the fate of a negligent mother who hadn’t properly taken care of her child? Briony wanted to take her son and run, but…

The woman had called her Mother. 

And the baby’s true name was Percival.

Was it even possible? What kind of awful twist of fate would bring her here? Briony commanded her legs to move, but they defected, fused to the ground instead. She buried her head against Percival’s soft, warm skin and tried to ignore the words that the other mother spoke. 

Owen-Camilla-Noah-Therese-

Camilla.

In Briony’s mind, there was the sudden roar of surf, the crash of waves. She began to shake. A forgotten sensation seized her chest, tight and constricting. 

Then her long-dormant heart thudded once. Twice. And a voice broke through the thundering sea that had awakened in Briony’s soul. 

“Please,” Camilla said. 

Without opening her eyes, Briony reached out and placed the baby gently in Camilla’s arms. Camilla began to cry. Briony turned and fled, her heart finally racing, breaking and unbreaking, over and over again. 

As she ran, she began to cough. There were flecks of blood like rubies in her palm. Sand covered the asphalt, and she could smell the seaweed-and-brine scent of the nearby Pacific. That was good. That was right. 

Her heart sputtered and stopped, but this time there was peace in the stillness. 

She smiled as she collapsed to the sidewalk. Perhaps this was it, then.