The story started to come back to me as I spent more time with and working for the Frankensteins. I wasn't sure how different things were going to be now that I had changed the course of the story and, thus, the fate of Elizabeth Lavenza.

Who knows? Maybe Frankenstein's ill-begotten son wouldn't be with her on their wedding night. I guessed I would have to wait and see.

For now, I was entrenched in keeping my little servant-girl facade and using it as a means to an end. The end in question was Elizabeth surviving the story.

"Come on, Vasquez," I told myself, under my breath, as I washed Alphonse Frankenstein's delicates. "Think. Think. What could go wrong? What could change?"

The fact of the matter was, everything was liable to change. There was no predicting what those things would be. If William wasn't dead, what reason would Victor have to come home? What reason would he and Elizabeth have to hurry up and get married? The entire chain of events was up for grabs, basically. With all these differences in the air, who was to say that Victor would return at all?

As it turns out, he did. He arrived with his father within a few months of when I first arrived. He whined through the door, and everybody was glad to see him, Elizabeth included. To be frank, I didn't get the hype. Even when reading the book, I got the impression that he was kind of a self-obsessed prick. Intelligent, sure. A complicated man and an interesting character to study, absolutely. The victim of different kinds of grief I always got the distinct impression that I would despise him if he were real.

Now he was, and he was taking over every inch of the house. Everywhere I looked, there he was. I was constantly reminded of his presence. There wasn't a second of peace, especially when the fact that he was here was all Elizabeth wanted to talk about. (To be fair, it was a hot topic.)

For the first week that Victor was home, I spent a lot of time looking over my shoulder, watching for the monster. It felt wrong to call him that. I wasn't sure if he was truly monstrous, or just a product of his surroundings. The fact remained that he was made of human parts and had the potential for greatness,, even if much of that was involuntarily squandered or smashed down. I felt that, as such, it was important to give him a name.

Adam seemed to fit. I was sure that I had seen someone refer to him like that before. He was, after all, like a first man-- crafted from what could be found, made by a careless god. The difference here was, this Adam was never given an Eden to tend to. He never had a choice in the fall.