“Sidney,” she called. “Josie. Finn. The four of us need to talk. Now.”
It wasn’t a request.
We gathered in the kitchen, the only room in the house that wasn’t currently occupied by sleeping or resting guardians. My mother stood at the counter with her back to the sink, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea I could tell she hadn’t touched. My father had claimed the chair nearest the door and perched on the edge of its seat, his back rigid with tension, while I sat at the table across from him. Ben’s absence from the room felt like a missing limb, but I understood why my grandmother had excluded him from this particular conversation.
Some things were family business. And whatever else had changed, Ben wasn’t family.
Not yet, anyway.
My grandmother remained standing, her sharp gaze moving between the three of us as if cataloging our reactions. She looked tired, I realized — really tired, in a way I’d never seen her before. Nine months in the Waiting Place had taken their toll, even if she was too stubborn to show it.
“We don’t have much time,” she said. “The guardians are here, but they won’t stay forever. Their own portals need them, and the longer they’re away, the more vulnerable those thresholds become. We have perhaps a week, maybe two, before they’ll need to return to their posts.”
“A week isn’t much time to stop Gregory and heal the ley lines,” I said.
“No, it isn’t.” My grandmother’s gaze settled on me, seeming to take stock of all the ways I was a different Sidney from the granddaughter she’d left behind all those months ago. “Which is why we need to be honest with each other about what we’re dealing with. All of us.”
Her attention shifted to my father, and I saw him stiffen.
“Finn,” she said, her voice neutral but pointed, “you’ve been watching my family for seventeen years…protecting us from the shadows, if what Sidney tells me is accurate. But you never told us you were there. You never reached out, never let us know we had an ally in the darkness.” She paused there, letting the words settle. “Why?”
My father was quiet for a moment, his eyes fixed on the tabletop. When he finally spoke, his voice was tight, as if the words were being dragged out of him against his will.
“Because I knew you’d tell me to stop.”
“Would we have been wrong?”
“Yes.” He looked up then, meeting my grandmother’s gaze with something that might have been defiance. “You would have been wrong. Emily, you know what I am, what I’ve always been. A mundane in a family of guardians, a liability waiting to happen. When Sidney was young, that didn’t matter as much. But as she got older, as her abilities started to emerge, I could see what was coming. Threats I couldn’t fight, dangers I couldn’t even understand. If I’d stayed, I would have been a weak point. A target.”
“So you left,” I said, and I was surprised by how steady my voice sounded. “You decided that protecting us from a distance was better than being present.”
“I decided that keeping you alive was more important than keeping you happy.” His eyes met mine, and I saw the cost of that decision written in every line of his face. “I knew you’d hate me for it, Sidney. I knew Josie would hate me. But I also knew that if something came for this family, I couldn’t be the reason it succeeded.”
The kitchen fell silent. I could hear the muffled sounds of the guardians settling in elsewhere in the house, the creak of old floorboards, the whisper of the night wind against the windows. All normal enough sounds, domestic sounds, utterly at odds with the conversation we were having.
“You could have told me.” My mother’s voice was quiet, but it cut through the silence like a blade. She hadn’t moved from her position at the counter, her untouched tea growing cold in her hands. “Finn, you could have explained instead of just vanishing…instead of leaving me to tell Sidney that her father didn’t love her anymore.”
“Is that what you told her?” His voice cracked on the words.
“What else was I supposed to say?” Now there was heat in her tone, the first real emotion she’d shown since we’d entered the kitchen. “You left a note, Finn. Three sentences. ‘I have to go. Don’t try to find me. I’m sorry.’ That was it. That was all you gave us after ten years of marriage, after building a life together, after— ” She stopped herself there, pressing her lips together as if she was physically holding back the rest of the words.
“You knew.” My father’s voice was a rough murmur. “You knew I was watching. The checks — ”
“Of course I knew.” My mother set down her tea with an audible clank. Some tea splashed on the tile counter, unheeded. “My mother told me about the arrangement a year after you left. The surveillance network, the monthly payments, all of it. She said you’d asked her to keep it secret, but she thought I deserved to know that my husband hadn’t just abandoned us.” She paused, something painful flickering across her face. “That he was still out there somewhere, keeping us safe in the only way he knew how.”
I stared at her, feeling the ground seem to shift beneath my feet. “You knew? All this time, you knew he was watching, and you never told me?”
“You were a child, Sidney.” My mother’s voice softened, but it didn’t make the words any easier to hear. “A child who was already struggling to understand why her father had left. How was I supposed to explain the rest of it? The surveillance and the secrets and the impossible choice he’d made? You would have wanted to find him, and that would have put both of you at risk.”
My mouth thinned. “So instead, you let me think he didn’t care.”
“I let you think what was simplest.” She came over so she was standing in front of me, her hands reaching for mine. I let her take them, even though part of me wanted to pull away. “I let you be angry because anger was easier than the truth. And I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for all of it.”
I looked down at our joined hands — her fingers slim and familiar against mine, her skin unmarked by the dimensional burns that traced my own forearms. She’d protected me, or at least had tried to. They’d both tried to protect me, in their own broken, inadequate ways. And somehow, despite everything, I’d survived. I’d grown into the person sitting at this table, scarred but whole, with fire in her blood and the weight of worlds on her shoulders.
“I’m not a child anymore,” I said quietly. “And I’m not going to break because the truth is complicated. So stop protecting me from it. Both of you.”
The words hung there, a challenge and a plea wrapped together. I felt my mother’s grip tighten on my hands, saw my father lean forward in his chair, something almost like hope flickering in his dark eyes.