Or when.

Before I knew it, I was standing in front of a cheval mirror in a gown I didn’t remember picking out.

The masquerade had a theme this year: Hypnos’s Gala . Every invitation bore the image of a poppy-wreathed figure with fingers pressed to smiling lips. Everyone joked about it. “Don’t drink the punch unless you want to wake up married.” “Careful, the DJ is actually a neurologist.” Just party chatter. Rich people’s Halloween with better tailoring.

I looked down. The gown’s embroidery had changed. Where before there had been a single star over my womb, now there were two. And they were pulsing faintly, in time with a flutter I felt deep inside.

Then, a whisper.

I just didn’t know to whom.

Not words, exactly. More like the shape of words pressed against the inside of my skull. Let go. Step into the dance. You are exactly where you need to be.

The last thing I remember before the door opened was the whisper’s final gift: a single memory surfacing from the trance. Myself, kneeling on a floor of rose petals and pocket watches, lifting a silver chalice to my lips, and whispering, “I consent. I consent. I consent.”

But my hand—the one not pressed to my belly—was smudged with dried ink. Indigo. The same color as the constellations on my gown.

“Don’t panic,” I told my reflection. The woman in the mirror smiled back a beat too late. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, dreamy, utterly at peace. That wasn’t me. I don’t smile.

A knock at the door. Three slow, rhythmic taps. Then a voice, low and amused, with an accent I couldn’t place. “Love? The midwife is here. She says the heartbeat is strong. Both of them.”

Both?

Before I could scream, the spiral in my eyes turned once more. My knees went soft. My fear dissolved like sugar in warm milk. The woman in the mirror finally smiled with my face—not delayed, not dreamy, but truly mine.