The snow enthralled Peter. He stood at the French windows of his mother's home, transfixed by the site of millions of tiny flecks of frozen water, falling from the great grey nothingness of sky. He was intrigued by the simultaneous weakness and strength of the snow. One flake was nothing; a mere wisp of air and water that broke under the heat of his palm. Yet many, many of them, working all together, could immobilize an entire town, could crush and bury the very same body that held a single snowflake in its palm.

Peter loved the way the snow was a large blanket, too. Covering all in sight, making it difficult to distinguish one house from another, one person from another. He remembered the words from the poem his mother had read to him the night before.

"It makes an even face of mountain and of plain," Peter murmured softly.

"Come away from the door," his mother ordered from her seat on the sofa across the room. "You've been over there for an hour. It will still be there tomorrow."

"But I've never seen snow in real life," Peter protested, walking over to the sofa and nestling against her. "It's always been warm where we've lived."

His mother looked down at him with her steel blue eyes. "I've always tried to keep you from the cold," she replied sternly, but consented to wrap an arm around Peter when he butted up against her unyieldingly.

For a while Peter was silent, so silent in fact, that his mother believed he was asleep and the only sound that filled the drawing room of the Swiss mansion was his breathing and the tight flips of the pages of her book. It was a sweet nothingness, a beautiful calm that Peter's mother so rarely had enjoyed in her life. She drank it in like the air, feeling the whiteness of the sky outside the windows and tasting the crisp taps of the flakes against the panes. The weight of the boy lying in her lap was nothing at all.

A question broke the calm. "Why do I have to leave tomorrow?"

Peter's mother looked down at her lap in surprise. Peter's wide, dark eyes met hers in question.

She sighed. "Because you have to."

"But why do I have to?"

Claire now closed the book, tossed it onto the coffee table, and pushed Peter off of her lap, sitting him down next to her.

"Because it'll keep you safe."

Peter leaned against Claire again, not caring that she kept her body stiff against his affections. "I don't want to leave you. I'll never see you again if I do."

Claire rolled her eyes. The boy was smart; it did no good to lie to him. In some ways that made her job easier. In other ways it made her feel like a monster, telling the brutal truth to a six year old boy.

But then again, she silently reasoned, I am a monster.

"Yes, that's true. You won't," she said softly, gently curling his dark hair between her fingers. "But you'll be with others like you. Other little boys, who like the things you do, who can do the things you can do. You'll be happy there."

"No, I won't."

"You'll make friends."

"I don't want friends."

"Of course you do."

"No, I don't."

"That's just because your world right now revolves around me," Claire explained. "But very soon you'll realize just how big it really is, and how special you are. You'll see that eventually you have to give up the things you love…but it's always for the best." She stood up now, holding out her hand.

Peter hesitated for a moment, but finally took her hand, and it felt hot and hard against his. His mother led him upstairs, to the bathroom where she drew a hot bath for him. She filled the steamy water with blueberry scented soap and allowed him to play with his plastic boats while she scrubbed the back of his neck and behind his ears and under his fingernails. She lifted him from the tub and silently dried him off. She made him put on his pajamas by himself, but she combed his hair. She stood in the doorway of the bathroom while he brushed his teeth, counting the time to make sure he scrubbed every corner of his mouth. But when he was done, she lifted him in her arms, the way she had when he was much younger, and put him to bed, tucking his blue and white quilt around him.

She dimmed the light by his bed. "Go to sleep," she told him. "Don't get up to stare at the snow. It'll be there tomorrow, like I said." She began to walk out of the room.

"Mommy."

Claire turned back at the small sound, slightly muffled by the blankets. "Yes."

"Will you miss me after I'm gone?"

Claire walked back to the bed, staring down at the little boy she'd raised from a seed. The dark eyes staring up from the Little Boy Blue bed were pure, and innocent, and they demanded what every child had the natural right to demand. But what those eyes wanted had drained out of Claire years ago.

"No more questions," she said. "It's time for bed. We'll have breakfast, then Samuel will take you home."

"But this is home," Peter protested. But he turned over, away from Claire, succeeding in having the last word.

Claire now went to her room, retrieving a suitcase for Peter to take with him. She would tell him that it had everything he needed to start his new life, but it was a lie. His life was going to end the moment he left that house.

"I am a monster," Claire admitted out loud, as she packed the clothes and shoes Peter would never wear, packed the photos the two of them had taken that he would never see. She stopped, thought of something as she packed Peter's teddy bear.

She pressed the dark brown mass of fur and cotton - a symbol of the fragility of innocence - against her chest and sighed deeply.

"But then again…so is he."