I have been avoiding Finn, ignoring the messages that he sends me or telling him that I can't meet with him. I haven't come to terms with the memories that Shadow returned to me, feeling like someone pushed me into the cold deep end while I was still busy sticking my toes in.

I am waiting for him to just show up one day like he had before. Throughout the day, I fluctuate between being absolutely furious and being in the depths of remorse. I almost wish that the pawnshop was busier to keep my mind from lingering on everything, but it is a futile hope.

In the middle of looking through my ledger where I was making sure to note that several people had stopped by the previous evening to retrieve their memories, I hear the bell dinging. I close the book slowly, looking up to find that Mrs. Miles is making her way towards me.

"Hello, Mrs. Miles," I say, stepping around the counter to give her a steadying hand. Up close, she appears to be white as a sheet as sweat beads against her forehead. "What brings you here today?"

Her breath escapes through clenched teeth. "I was on my way to sell you another memory. I thought I had been having Braxton-Hicks all day, but my water broke on the way here."

I swear my lungs have stopped working as they should for a moment as much as my muscles attempt to melt into a puddle of jelly. Only the firm grip of the other woman as another contraction ripples through her body draws me back into my body, kickstarting all systems into high gear.

"Do you need me to find someone for you? Is there somewhere or someone nearby that can help you?" I ask, starting to realize that it was a mistake to wish that the pawnshop was busy.

"There's not enough time. The doctor warned me that since this was my third child that this one was going to come quickly." A contraction cuts off her words as her grip tightens around my hand. "You are going to have to help me deliver this baby, Mae."

I bite back all the words that leap to my lips at the thought of her having a baby here, in the pawnshop, with me as her only help. There is no context for me in this scenario, no memories that were either my own or someone else's to draw on.

"Mae," she says, seeming to sense how scared and worried and concerned I was, "you can do this. I have been through this before and basically know what to expect. You are here mainly for moral support."

Taking a deep breath, I carefully steer her through the aisles of the pawnshop to the back room that both of us are so familiar with. I help her get settled in the chair that still made me grimace when I thought of Shadow occupying it, amazed at the fact that she was so calm when my blood was roaring through me.

"I'm going to go flip the sign to closed. Is there anything else that I need to grab while I am out there?"

A few minutes later, I slam back through the curtain, arms full of supplies. Mrs. Miles has managed to ease herself out of the chair and walk through the shelves, staring wide-eyed at the jars as the memories flutter towards her. The sight manages to dissipate some of the panic that enveloped me since she came into my shop, and I find enough presence of mind to start to organize the mess in my arms.

"The contractions are getting closer now," she tells me, finding her way back to me. The memories light her way, casting almost an unearthly glow around her. "It shouldn't be too much longer."

Time loses its meaning in the back room, and I swear that I'm never going to call her a liar because it truly isn't much longer before I find myself catching a tiny baby. She is wailing and covered in all sorts of fluid, but as I clamp and cut the cord, she steals a part of my heart.

Once I wrap her in a blanket that I had found in one of the cupboards behind my counter and settle her on Mrs. Miles' chest, I see that my hands are quivering with the massiveness of what I had just been a part of. The other woman is smiling at her new daughter, talking softly to her as the baby blinks sleepily at her.

I swear that the jars over our heads are burning like the sun, and I am almost scared that if I look up at them, I'm going to find little faces pressed against the glass like some fairies out of a storybook. Peeling off my gloves, I toss them on top of a ruined towel and brush my damp curls away from my forehead.

"She's adorable," I whisper, watching the baby's face scrunch up before she sneezes. It is a sound that seems too loud to have come from her body. "What are you going to call her?"

Mrs. Miles aims her smile at me. "How would you feel if I called her Maeve?"

I shake my head. "There is no way you are going to name that baby after me. It'll just confuse people if we happen to be in the same place at the same time. However, I would be okay with you using my name as her middle name if you are determined to name her after me."

She laughs. "We have a deal. It's a shame that those baby clothes that you bought off of someone didn't come in closer to today because we would have had some clothes to put her in."

"Well, I may have gotten you an outfit or two for when the baby arrived. I just wasn't expecting to be giving them to you right after I had had a hand in delivering her." I move from her side to rummage through one of the boxes that I had set next to the back door. I had bought little footed pajamas and a dress, unable to resist when I had seen them.

She sets the baby in her lap and gently dresses her in the pajamas, zipping them up as she coos at her daughter. "There you go, little Anna Mae Miles. Your aunt Maeve always seems to know exactly what to have on hand for the people who are going to walk into her shop. You're going to love her when you are old enough to remember meeting her."

I find myself blinking back tears, and she holds out Anna to me. "I feel up to giving you a memory if you have somewhere to tuck her. And don't you dare protest that I shouldn't be doing it. You can copy the memory of childbirth, and it's fresh enough in my mind where you should have to go digging for it."

The fire in her eyes warns me against protesting. I take the baby from her, rocking her as I wander back towards the door to kick an empty cardboard box over to the chair. Laying Anna in it, I look at Mrs. Miles. I grab the jar that I had set on the table next to us around the time that it had become the resting place for my makeshift birthing equipment and scoot my stool a little closer to her.

"You tell me if I need to pull back. I am not going to extract a memory at the risk of hurting you."

She nods, and I press my forehead against her, diving into the recesses of her mind to find the memory waiting for me. It envelops me like a warm hug, barely requiring a tug to convince it to make its way out of Mrs. Miles' mind with me. I find it strange to be witnessing the birth from a different angle, making what has happened feel even more intimate than it was before.

Carefully, I drop the memory into the jar, its yellow glow shining. "I'm going to copy this real quick while you are here, so I can give it back to you right away. It would be awkward if someone asked you what Anna Mae's birth was like, and you weren't able to give them an answer because you didn't remember it."

She laughs. "Well, I do have two others to draw on if I was really desperate, but I don't mind waiting for you to copy the memory if you are that concerned."

I place the baby back into her arms before picking up the jar, which I hadn't even bothered to seal due to the placid nature of the memory, and heading over to my microscope. Flipping the light on with one hand while reaching for my goggles with the other, I tip the jar over for the memory to ooze out onto the microscope. I pull my goggles on and dive back into it.

"I've never seen you do this part of the process before," Mrs. Miles' voice echoes slightly as I scan the scenes of the memory to find the glob. "What is it like?"

"It's not much different than when I am looking for the memory to extract it from your mind. This part does usually require me to view the memory at least one time through though because I often miss the glob that contains a copy of it. Either way, the memories that I view end up becoming one of my memories, which is why I don't use labels to keep track of the jars on my shelves."

I reach for the cool metal of my tweezers as I find the glowing glob floating against Anna Mae's forehead when memory Mrs. Miles is holding her for the first time. I get no fight, calmly tugging it away and backing away from the microscope in case the memory decides to get rowdy like all the others. I drop the piece I plucked into another empty jar, screwing on the lid before labeling it. The whole while the memory lies in the circle of light cast by my microscope, hardly seeming aware that I had taken the part that allows me to duplicate it.

Sliding the memory back into the other jar, I take it back to the other woman. She grabs it while handing me Anna again, and I watch as the memory returns to its place without any fuss. "I think that is the easiest time I have ever had."

"You mean it isn't normally like that?" She asks, setting the jar aside and slowly getting out of the chair.

"No, they usually fight me after I take the glob from them. Memories hate losing a part of themselves even if it doesn't necessarily take anything away from the purity of it. It was kind of nice."

I manage to get both mother and daughter out of the shop without incident. I watch them make their way down the street, grateful that there is still some daylight left, before returning to the back room. There, I bundle up the towel and other items that I need to pitch, wandering out to the alley to dump them in the dumpster.

When I return, I find Finn standing next to one of my shelves, studying the jars intently. I blink rapidly a couple of times, hoping that he disappears, but he doesn't, which tells me that he isn't just a figment conjured up by my tired mind.

"What are you doing here?" I ask. He startles, bumping into the shelf with enough force to rattle all of the jars. "We had a deal, Finn."

"That was before you decided to start ignoring me," he retorts. "Please tell me that this isn't what I think it is, Mae. Please tell me that I am not looking at a memory-pawning business running out of the back of your pawnshop. Please tell me this is a dream."

I cross my arms, staring him down. "It's exactly what it looks like. That memory supplier you had been looking for and that you talked me into looking for. That's me. It has been me basically since I inherited this place from Uncle Pierce and had to find some way to keep my head above water.

"Now, if you will excuse me, I have had a long and tiring day. We can talk about this tomorrow or when you decide to set the rest of the Department on me to arrest me for being part of illegally copying people's memories."

Finn blocks my way before I can manage to make it out of the curtain. "Why wouldn't you have told me that you needed money? If I had known, I wouldn't have ever let you get involved in something like this."

"I am not talking about this tonight, Finley," I say, gritting my teeth. "Get out of my way right now."

When he doesn't move, I reverse courses and head for the back door. "Make sure to lock the front door before you leave. The key's on the second shelf of the display case. I would hate for someone to end up stealing something from the pawnshop even if it won't be mine after tomorrow."

As satisfying as it is to hear the door slam behind me, it doesn't stop me from seeing my world and so many others burning around me. The ship is going down, and if I had anything to say about it, I was going to be the only one who drowned. However, something tells me that won't be possible though.