Angels Watching Over You
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6: What She Needed
By the third cycle, what hair Cissy had left came out in earnest, and with it went something in her that had nothing to do with vanity, exactly, though it looked like vanity from the outside. She stopped wanting to look in mirrors. She took to wearing the soft cotton cap Bea had bought her even to bed, tugging it lower whenever anyone new came into the room, and she began asking, at odd moments, in a small voice that made Étaín’s chest ache to hear, whether she was still pretty.
She never asked Bea. She only ever asked Liam.
“Am I ugly now?” she said one evening, sitting on his bed with her knees drawn up, the cap pulled down over what was left of her hair.
“No,” Liam said, without a second’s hesitation, the way he answered most things that actually mattered to him.
“You have to say that. You’re my best friend.”
“I’d say it even if I wasn’t,” he said. “Your face didn’t change. That’s the part I look at anyway.”
Cissy studied him for a long moment, searching, the way she’d taken to searching everyone’s faces lately for the flinch she was afraid was coming. She didn’t find it in his. She never did.
The daytime clinginess came on the same slow, escalating schedule as the nighttime kind. She’d stopped playing in her own yard when Liam wasn’t in it, stopped agreeing to anything — a trip to the corner store with Bea, a few minutes alone with a coloring book — that put more than a room’s width between them. If he left to use the bathroom, she counted the seconds out loud sometimes, quiet under her breath, as though naming the wait might make it shorter.
“You don’t have to come with me to the bathroom,” Liam told her once, not unkindly, standing in the hallway while she hovered a few feet from the door.
“I know,” she said. “I just don’t want to be alone right now.”
“You’re not alone. Mom’s right there.”
“It’s not the same,” Cissy said, and didn’t explain further, and he didn’t ask her to, because by then he’d stopped needing the explanation spelled out to understand it.
Bea tried, more than once, to give her daughter some gentler words for what she was feeling than Cissy had for it herself. “You know you can talk to me too, baby. Not just Liam. I’m your mama.”
“I know,” Cissy said, in the small, apologetic voice she’d started using for anything that might hurt someone’s feelings. “It’s not that I don’t want you. It’s just — you worry. I can see it on your face when I tell you things. Liam doesn’t look worried. He just looks like he already knew.”
Bea hadn’t had an answer for that one. She’d only pulled her daughter into her lap, bald head and all, and held her, and let the honesty of it sit in the room without trying to argue her out of it.
It was on one of the rare days Cissy felt well enough for it that Bea took both children to the pharmacy to be fitted for a proper wig, something better than the cotton cap for the days she might want to feel more like herself out in the world. A boy waiting near the register with his own mother, seven or eight and entirely without malice in the way small children often are without malice, looked at Cissy’s bare head under the removed cap and asked, loudly and simply, “Why doesn’t she have hair?”
Cissy went rigid, her hand flying up to cover her scalp, her whole small body curling inward the way it did before tears she was trying to outrun.
Liam stepped between her and the boy before either mother had fully turned around. “She’s sick,” he said, flat and unbothered, the way you’d state a fact about the weather. “The medicine that’s helping her get better takes her hair for a while. It’s going to grow back.”
“Oh,” the boy said, already losing interest, the way children do once a mystery has been answered to their satisfaction. “Okay.”
It was such a small exchange, over almost before Bea had crossed the aisle to intervene, but Cissy’s hand stayed pressed to her own head the rest of the visit, and it was Liam, not either mother, who finally coaxed it back down by taking that hand in his own instead and simply not letting go.
“You didn’t have to say anything,” she told him quietly, once they were back in the car.
“Yeah, I did,” Liam said. “You looked like you needed someone to say it who wasn’t scared to.”
“Can I sleep in here tonight?” she asked. “Just — on the floor. I don’t want to be by myself.”
She didn’t sleep in her own room again for the better part of two weeks, not in any way that stuck. She’d start there, dutifully, and wake at some point past midnight and pad across the yard in her socks and Bea’s old cardigan to knock, soft and apologetic, on Liam’s window rather than the door, as though a window felt like less of an imposition. He never once told her no. He’d let her in, and the two of them would end up on the floor of his room more nights than not, a nest of blankets pulled down from his bed, because the bed itself, Cissy had decided without much explanation, felt too big and too exposed for whatever she needed at two in the morning.
It was Bea who found them there on one of the nights she’d come looking, worried when she woke to an empty bed in Cissy’s room and no note, no sound, nothing but the porch light Étaín kept on for exactly this reason.
She let herself in through the unlatched door, the way she’d done a hundred times by now, and found them on the floor of Liam’s room in the nest of blankets, fast asleep, Cissy curled small with her back against his chest and his arm settled over her the way you’d settle a hand over something you meant to keep safe through the night. Neither of them stirred at the light from the hallway.
Bea stood in the doorway a long while, not waking them, one hand pressed flat against her own sternum as though she needed to remind her own heart to keep working through whatever it was doing at the sight of the two of them like that.
She didn’t move them. She got a spare blanket from the hall closet, laid it over both of them without disturbing the arrangement they’d found on their own, and stood there a moment longer before she finally turned off the hall light and went back to her own bed.
She told Étaín about it the next morning over coffee, her voice not quite steady.
“I don’t know how to explain what it did to me, seeing that,” she said. “It wasn’t sad, exactly. It wasn’t only sad.”
“What was it, then?” Étaín asked.
“It was the safest I’ve seen her look since this whole thing started,” Bea said. “Safer than in my own arms, if I’m honest with you, and that’s a hard thing for a mother to say out loud about anybody.”
“I know,” Étaín said, and meant it.
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