Emily

With her father off who knows where, Emily and Renji were currently in the care of Aldo. Emily was looking through a book and came across a picture of two stags fighting. She brought the book to Aldo and held it up so he could see. "Look! I found some deers! They're maaaad..." She proclaimed, turning the page to show her babysitter another picture. "And this is a woof! I bet he's cold." She pointed to a picture of a big wolf standing in the snow. And, being a toddler with a short attention span, the subject quickly changed. "When will it snow here? When will Christmas come? What is Santa gonna bring me?"

But something caught her eye on the next page. She looked at it closely. It was about baby animals and their mothers. "The baby horse has a mom, the baby puppy has a mom, the baby kitty has a mom, the baby bird has a mom..." She looked up at Aldo with a sad look in her eyes. "But Emily and Renji don't have a mom." It had hit her just now that if all these animals in her book had mothers, she should have one too.

Aldo

The young man was trying to watch a hockey game, but it soon became clear to him that it just wasn't going to work out that way. Having been with ATHA for as long as he could remember, Aldo knew he had to be very careful with Ben's 'children'. He couldn't just lock them in a room somewhere and call it good... he had to actually watch them. "Ask your daddy about Santa. I'm sure you'll get plenty of presents." Musing the last part sarcastically to himself, it was no secret that the two kids were spoiled in the community. "You're mom... she..." Uh oh, how was he suppose to handle that one...? He knew the story well enough; there mother 'died', but... had Ben told them that yet? "Hey, looky there. Do you like birds? That's a... neat one, huh? What color is that birdie?" Distraction usually worked... right?

Emily

Emily kept looking up at Aldo with those sad eyes of hers - bi-colored eyes, one green and one brown. Even at her young age, she could tell that Aldo was a bit uncomfortable about this subject, or at least of telling anything about it to the kids with no mother, but she didn't know that it meant to drop the subject.

The distraction worked...mostly. "Oh! A bird! It's a blue bird. A little blue bird with funny hair and black stripes." She looked at a picture of a blue jay, making up an entire story in her mind. "But that blue birdie is sad because he lost his mom. He'll never see her again and she's not coming back. He doesn't have a mom. I don't have one either. Maybe a bear killed the mama blue birdie and ate her and now she can't come home to her baby birds." They were rather dark thoughts for a three-year-old. Perhaps they came from those genes passed on to her from her 'real' father. The one who she would likely later be told killed her mother. "Maybe a bear ate and killed my mom too. Is that what happened?" Tears were forming in her eyes as she said this. She was determined to find out what happened to her mother.