The Renbaks gave Anneliese some time alone with Mom. The two of them snuggled on the patient's cot while Mom told Anneliese everything that had happened to her while she'd been away. Mom explained in great detail how close she'd come to dying, and the pain of losing a limb. When she showed Anneliese the stump where her leg used to be, Anneliese couldn't look away. She stared at the angry scar tissue and cool metal until her eyes swam with tears again.

"I'm sorry." Anneliese didn't know why she was apologizing, but it seemed like she needed to. "I'm so sorry, Mom."

Mom pulled her close again. "It's okay, baby. It's not your fault the Elrics lied to you."

Anneliese pulled back so she could meet her eyes. "What?"

"That Winry woman kicked me out of their house and brought me here. You've been living in this town how long and they never told you I was just a short walk away?"

Anneliese couldn't believe she's been so stupid. The Rockbells ran an automail business. Ed had said her mother was recovering from automail surgery. Was it too much of a stretch to figure out that Mom had been their patient? "Why would they do that?" she asked.

Mom shrugged. "How should I know? They're practically strangers, after all. But if I had to guess, I'd say Winry's jealous of me. It must drive her nuts to think another woman ever slept with her husband, even before they were married."

Anneliese supposed that made sense. She'd only seen Winry angry a few times, but she could believe she had a spiteful side. "But why would Ed go along with that?"

"Why wouldn't he? She's his wife. I'm just an old lay from years ago. It's obvious where his priorities are. He's got his real family to worry about."

Anneliese couldn't help but think of what Katie had said to her. The people who gave birth to you, that doesn't always mean they're your real family. What really connected her to Ed or his family, aside from the fact that he'd had sex with her mother one time? Mom'd had sex with plenty of other people, and they hadn't tried to make Anneliese a part of their lives. What was Ed to her, really?

"Just wait until I'm on my feet again," said Mom. "We'll get a new place in East City. Somewhere nicer this time. Just for me and my little girl."

Anneliese responded the way she always did when Mom called her my little girl. "I'm your little girl and I love you."

Mom kissed her forehead and said, "I love you too."

Anneliese didn't get much time with Mom before she left for Rush Valley. She stayed the night at the Renbaks' and remained at Mom's side until she boarded the train the next day. Anneliese tried not to cry too hard and make a scene at the train station. But this was their second goodbye in as many months, and it still wasn't certain when Anneliese would see her again.

As Anneliese watched Mom's train disappear, Katie invited her back to her house. But Anneliese couldn't go back to playing as if nothing was wrong. And she couldn't go back to Ed's house either. All Anneliese really wanted was to be alone.

So she let the Renbaks think she was going back to Ed's house, but once she was out of sight, she turned down a path she'd seen very few people walk down the whole time she was in Risembool. She passed fields both flush and fallow until she came to a tree that was blackened at the top as if it had been burned. Next to it was a pile of overgrown rubble. Anneliese didn't know what this place was and she didn't care. But she figured it was as good a place to stop as any.

She sat, leaning against the dead tree, and threw rocks at the crumbled wall. Who did Ed and Winry think they were, anyway, keeping her away from Mom? Why did she have to be punished for whatever had happened years before she was born? Why did Ed and Winry act like they cared about her, and then lie to her? Maybe they never cared about her at all.

Her vision swam with tears at that thought, which made her even angrier. Who said she even wanted them to care about her, anyway? She sure didn't ask them to be a part of her life. But even though it was a stupid thing to cry about and Anneliese had spent too much of the last twenty-four hours crying, she rested her head and arms on her knees and sobbed. At least no one was there to see or hear her.

Anneliese didn't remember falling asleep, but the next thing she knew, she was being shaken awake by some teenager in the dim light of dusk.

"Hey kid," said the teenage boy. "Kid. You should get up. Isn't your mom looking for you?"

Anneliese rubbed at her eyes. "My mom's not here," she said hoarsely.

"Uh . . . duh," said the teenager, and a couple voices behind him laughed. "You need someone to walk you home?"

"I can't walk home," Anneliese said. "Home is in East City. And I definitely don't want to go back to my dad's house."

The teenagers all laughed again, which made Anneliese think they were making fun of her. But the teenage boy said, "Shoot, we came here to get away from our parents, too."

"Hey, you're the new girl, aren't you? Edward Elric's daughter," one of the boy's friends - a girl - asked. "Don't you know this was his house?"

"And you came here to get away from him!" said a different boy. "That's ironic as hell."

Anneliese looked at the rubble skeptically. "This was a house?"

"Yep," said the boy who'd woken her. "Everyone says he burned it down on purpose, too."

"Why?"

They shrugged. "Probably to cover up the evidence," said the other boy.

The girl shoved at him. "Gary! You'll scare her."

"What? I don't really think he killed anyone. But you've seen the grave in the backyard too."

Shocked, Anneliese got to her feet. "Someone's buried here?" She didn't mean for her voice to come out as high pitched as it did.

"Shut up, Gary, you are scaring her," said the boy who'd woken Anneliese. "Look, whoever's buried here, your dad probably didn't kill them. Murderers don't put grave markers where they bury their victims. Shoot, it's probably not even a person. I bet it's a dog or something."

"Big dog," muttered Gary.

"Shut up!" his friends both yelled.

"Anneliese!" called a voice in the distance. "Anneliese!" It sounded like Ed.

"She's over here!" the girl called back.

Anneliese shot an angry look at her. "Why did you do that?"

"You can't stay out here forever," she answered.

"I will if I want to!" Anneliese said stubbornly.

But by then Ed had caught up to them. "Anneliese! Are you okay? Why didn't you come home when it started getting dark?"

"Your house is not my home," she answered stonily.

Ed bit his lip uncomfortably. ". . . Right."

"And why did you burn this house down? Who's buried here and how did they die?"

His jaw dropped. "Uh . . . well, that's a loaded question." His eyes fell on the three very uncomfortable-looking teenagers.

"We didn't mean to -"

"Gary was just being an idiot -"

"Everyone knows you didn't really kill anybody -"

"Kill anybody?" Ed repeated. "Who says I -"

"Nobody!"

Ed sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I guess it doesn't look very good, does it?" He shook his head. "Anyway, thanks for finding Anneliese. I'm just glad she's safe."

The teenagers accepted his thanks and made their getaway the first chance they got, clearly worried they might get in some sort of trouble. Anneliese was not happy to be left alone with Ed, who had not only lied to her but also hadn't denied that he'd killed anyone. She sat back against the tree with a huff. "I'm not going anywhere with you until you tell me what happened here."

"Anneliese, I . . ." Ed looked at her helplessly, then nodded resignedly before sitting down beside her. "I get it. I've kept a lot of things hidden from you and you deserve some answers."

He picked up a rock and started fiddling with it before continuing. "There are two things that alchemists are forbidden to create. One is gold. And the other is human beings. The transmutation to create gold is easy. Creating people . . . not so much. But we tried it anyway. My brother and I tried to bring our mother back from the dead."

Anneliese sat up straighter. That was something alchemists could do? Or rather, try to do. Obviously it hadn't worked.

Ed continued, "When a transmutation is impossible, there's a rebound. With a minor transmutation, an alchemist might get injured. But with a major one . . . I lost my leg. Al lost a lot more than that. I was able to get him back to normal eventually, but the . . . person . . . we created, not only was it not even our mother, it was . . . deformed. It died just minutes after we made it. But I figured it deserved its own grave. And the house . . . we couldn't stand going back inside it anymore. I was so ashamed of what I'd done that I burned it to the ground. There was no going back after that."

Well, that was horrifying. Anneliese had always thought of alchemy as a magic fix that made people's lives easier. This was especially true lately, since Ed had taught Anneliese how to clean her sheets on the sly. It made her bedwetting slightly less embarrassing. Sure, you heard stories, in the movies or on the radio, of alchemy going horribly wrong, but that was all they were - stories that happened to strangers in a far-off place. Not anymore. Alchemy had taken Ed's leg the way Mom had lost hers. This backyard would've been left graveless and this house standing, were it not for alchemy.

"Is that why you never actually do any alchemy?" Anneliese asked. She'd noticed how strange it was that Ed had never performed a transmutation, despite how much he talked about it.

"Ah . . . kind of? In a roundabout way. I would still be able to transmute if I hadn't performed human transmutation, but there's a lot more to it than that."

Anneliese was sure the full explanation was probably another boring alchemy lecture. Instead she said, "You must have really loved your mom, to try and bring her back like that."

Ed nodded. "Yeah."

She didn't want it to, but Anneliese's vision swam with tears again. "So why did you try to keep me away from mine?"

"Anneliese -" He reached out to her, but she flinched away. "I'm sorry. I knew it was wrong and I'm sorry."

"But why did you do it?"

"I was - I was afraid."

"Of Winry?"

"What? No! Well, only when I break my automail," he added wryly.

"Then what were you afraid of?"

"I . . ." He shrunk back against the tree. "I can't explain it to you."

"Bullshit."

Ed slammed a palm to the ground. "Goddammit, Anneliese, I'm on your side!"

Anneliese flinched. Ed had never raised his voice to her before. She tried to keep the quaver out of her voice as she said, "Well, you're sure not acting like it."

Ed's face wiped itself clean of tension at once. "I - I know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you just now. I was just . . ."

"Afraid," Anneliese finished for him. "And you won't tell me why."

Ed folded his arms and looked away. Just when Anneliese was about to say something, he spoke up. "All I can tell you is, your mother . . . she betrayed my trust. In a really big way. And I haven't really been able to deal with it since. When I found out about you, I thought I could get close to you without having to deal with . . . what happened. But I should've known. I learned a long time ago, every good thing has a price."

"A price," Anneliese repeated. Was being around Mom really that bad for Ed? How could it be? It wasn't like Mom was evil or anything. She wasn't perfect, Anneliese knew, but she loved Anneliese. "For a good thing? Being close to me is a good thing?"

"Of course it is," said Ed. "You're a great kid."

Of course he would say that now, when she was mad at him. "You lied to me," she reminded Ed.

"I know I shouldn't have. But listen. Tomorrow we'll call and make sure she made it to Rush Valley all right. And you can talk to her on the phone every day. How does that sound?"

"Every day?"

"Every day."

That was better than the last two and a half months of no contact at all. "And can I visit her sometime?" Anneliese asked.

"Ummm . . ." Ed shifted uncomfortably. "I mean, we do visit old friends in Rush Valley from time to time. You could see her. Sure."

"You promise?"

"I . . . yes. I promise."

Anneliese let him take her to his house after that. She needed a bath and a change of clothes, after all. The fuss Winry and Granny Pinako made over her being gone was kind of annoying, because of course they'd been in on the lie, too. They would've made a bigger fuss if she said anything about it, though, so she let them fuss.

It wasn't until later, while she was lying in bed, unable to sleep, that Anneliese figured out what really bothered her about her conversation with Ed. She had made him tell her one of his biggest secrets. Even though she'd needed to know, sharing big secrets like that wasn't something some guy who was letting you stay with him did. It was something you shared with someone you cared about.

Anneliese was mad at Ed because she wanted to be. Because even though the thought of him not caring about her at all had made her cry, the idea of him wanting to be close to her scared her even worse.

It was then that Anneliese decided that she really didn't want to know what had happened between Mom and Ed the night she had been made. Because if Ed could talk to her about the horrible things that happened when you tried to raise the dead, then whatever he couldn't talk to her about must be even worse. And if a secret as big as the one he had shared could make them closer . . .

This whole situation was too confusing. Mom couldn't do anything that bad anyway. If Ed wanted to keep secrets, he could. What did Anneliese care? As long as she was safe and she could talk to Mom, she didn't need anything else. Then when Mom was ready to have Anneliese live with her again, she could put Ed and his secrets behind her.