Herbalists' Cache millidelphia

Was she really?  Hm.  Where did she fit into his plans, then?  At one point he'd included Delight as a necessary tag-along, but he'd nixed himself from the list.  Queenie hadn't been around so Mal hadn't even bothered to think about her.  Was she as much of a disappointment?  Back to her question, though.  Uh.  I dunno.  A year?  He didn't seem particularly convinced.  When he'd left he'd still been in the pup ranks, but close to that transition.  And now he'd been wandering long enough that days had started to blur a little.  How long had it been?  It wasn't like they were gonna get big birthday parties.  Nobody liked pretending they existed.  Did he even know when he was born?  Either way, he was off by a couple months.

And when she continued and spoke of missing, well, most of his life, he shrugged. He didn't know how things might have been different.  There hadn't been too much to miss, though.  Mostly because after a certain point things seemed to socially come to a screeching halt and he didn't know what he'd missed out on.  Or what would eventually probably come back to haunt him.

Still, nothing said put a lid on that little voice that spoke the worst.  Part of it was probably his brain seeing things that his conscious mind wasn't entirely processing.  That something was off.  Maybe it was all a trick -- some cloudy memory that he'd awake from and it'd turn out to be a nightmare.  That maybe the reason he thought something might be wrong was because there was, but since he wasn't going over to examine her or anything and he was spending more time trying to study her expression...  There was, after all, one pointed question to ask, Where'd you go?  Okay, a few followups after that, like why Solomon wasn't with her, whether it was the witches' fault (duh), but he'd wait.