The cuckoo clock in the hallway said nine-thirty, but Emma Calloway knew her daughter wasn't going to sleep anytime soon.

She could tell by the eyes. Five-year-old Lily had her father's eyes - wide and dark and glittering with the particular brilliance of a child who has decided, on a molecular level, that sleep is for other people. She was lying down, technically. The pink comforter was pulled to her chin, technically. But those eyes were open and electric, trained on her mother with the focused intensity of a tiny lawyer who had not yet delivered her closing argument.

"You're not even a little bit tired," Emma said.

"I'm a little bit tired," Lily said.

"That is a lie."

"It's a very small lie." Lily considered this. "Mommy, tell me a story."

Emma sank onto the edge of the bed, tucking her feet up under her, reaching automatically to smooth a curl back from her daughter's forehead. The house was quiet the way houses got quiet after eight o'clock - the dishwasher running its soft cycle, the neighbor's porch light making a warm rectangle on the ceiling, the whole world settling in for the night. It was the kind of quiet that made a person feel like maybe bedtime stories were not such an unreasonable demand.

"Which one?" Emma asked.

"A new one."

"A new one." Emma looked at the stack of books on the nightstand - dog-eared and well-loved, every single one of them practically memorized. Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. Thumbelina. She'd told those stories so many times she could recite them in her sleep, and occasionally, she suspected, she actually did. "What kind of new one?"

Lily brightened immediately, the way only children can, the way that's like watching someone flip a switch. She pushed herself up on her elbows, comforter sliding half off, the tell of a girl who was absolutely not going to sleep anytime soon.

"With a castle," she announced. "And a knight. And a villain - a really good one, not a boring one. And then the knight has to fight the villain and win, and then he goes into the castle and he rescues the princess and they live happily ever after."

She said it all in one breath. It had the cadence of a speech that had been rehearsed many times, at least internally.

Emma looked at her daughter for a moment - this small, bright, entirely unreasonable person she had somehow produced - and felt the complicated warmth that motherhood specializes in, the kind that is equal parts exasperation and helpless adoration.

"Does the castle have to have a princess?" she asked.

Lily stared at her. "Mommy. It's a castle."

"Sure, but-"

"Castles have princesses. That's what castles are for."

"Hm." Emma tilted her head. "I wonder about that, actually."

"Wonder about what?"

"Well." Emma reached out and resettled the comforter around her daughter's shoulders, a move Lily submitted to with only minor protest. "What if I told you a story about a castle that didn't have a princess?"

Lily looked at her the way five-year-olds look at adults who are saying something self-evidently ridiculous, which is to say, with open and uncomplicated pity. "Then it would be a very sad castle."

"Or maybe," Emma said, "it would be a surprising one."

A pause. The dishwasher chunked softly through its cycle. Outside, a car moved slowly down the street, its headlights sweeping a slow arc across the ceiling.

"Is there still a knight?" Lily asked.

"Oh, there's a knight."

"A good one?"

Emma considered this with appropriate gravity. "He means well."

"Is he brave?"

"He's... enthusiastic."

Lily narrowed her eyes. "Mommy, is this going to be a weird story?"

"All the best stories are a little weird," Emma said. She reached over and clicked off the lamp on the nightstand, leaving only the soft glow of the nightlight in the corner - a small ceramic lighthouse that Emma had bought at a roadside stand when Lily was three and that Lily had never once consented to part with. The room went warm and quiet and small in the good way, in the way that is specific to children's bedrooms at bedtime, a feeling that Emma thought she could spend the rest of her life trying to bottle and never quite manage.

She settled herself more comfortably against the headboard, drawing her daughter close. Lily made a small sound of satisfaction and tucked herself in under her mother's arm like she'd been slotting into that exact space since the beginning of time, which she essentially had.

"Once upon a time," Emma began.

"Yes," Lily breathed. The word was somewhere between agreement and encouragement, a verbal settling-in.

"Once upon a time, there was a castle." Emma kept her voice low, that particular register that existed only at bedtime, round and unhurried. "Now, this was not a famous castle. It wasn't the kind of castle you find in fairy tales, all gleaming towers and banners and a moat with a proper drawbridge. It was - actually - a little bit ugly."

Lily giggled. "Castles aren't ugly."

"This one was. A little. It was very large and very old and it had this one tower that always looked slightly crooked, like it had been leaning against the wind for so long it forgot how to stand up straight. And the stones were gray, not white, which castle-watchers will tell you is much less impressive."

"Who were the castle-watchers?"

"People who watch castles."

"That's a real job?"

"In stories it is."

Lily accepted this. "Okay. Keep going."

"In this castle - this large, gray, slightly crooked castle - there lived a girl." Emma paused for effect. "And here's the thing about this girl: she was not a princess."

"Then what was she?"