“Sister, do you know him?” Asked the child, Tony, curiously. Alessa nodded. More than “know”, she thought to herself. She’d grown up with him in the orphanage, in the aftermath of her father’s death. She cried, daily, sometimes in throat rattling sobs, other times a weak whimper, but always a sense of earth-shattering change taking place around her. Like she could not trust the walls around her, that they might fall away and reveal another, stranger reality she knew nothing of. For the first time in her life she was alone, in every sense of the word, and she didn’t know what to do. At first, she’d stayed in bed until the uncanniness of her own life, spinning in circles around her head, drove her up and out, if only to get away from the repeating dreams that haunted her. It was then that