“Who are you?” I whispered.

Mary placed a cold palm against my cheek. “I’m whoever you need me to be. Whoever you see, that is who you need most.”

Memories of Mary surfaced, swimming up through the intervening years. I tried to dismiss them, to lock them away, and failed. Loss, bordering on despair began to fill me; a deepening void within a void. Desperately, I clung to the conversation. “I disagree! Mary and I have been done for years.”

She cocked her head to one side. “I never lie.”

“That makes you different from the real one already.” I said wryly. A shiver wracked through me and I brushed the false Mary’s hand away. Breaking the contact returned some warmth to my body and I shied away from her. “What are you?”

“I am everything that you see before you.” Her shadow grew larger, seeming to swim, writhing amorphously, in the fractured light of the cloud-covered moon.

“But if you looked in a mirror, what would you see?”

“There are ten-thousand faces in each of my reflections but none of them true.”