“You doing okay?” he asks, and I nod with a smile. “Aurora?”
I squeeze my arms around her, dropping a kiss against her hair. “I think she’ll be fine.”
“Can I come over?”
I chuckle. “Yeah. Pretty sure the door’s unlocked.”
Westley pushes back from the railing and disappears inside his house. It’s quiet out here, nothing but the distant rustle of wind through the trees and crickets chirping.
Aurora stirs in my arms, bringing a smile to my face as I look down at her.
She blinks up at me slowly. “Hi.”
“Hey, Superstar.”
Aurora yawns, looking around us at the darkness. “What time is it?”
I shake my head. “Not sure. Bedtime, I guess.”
“Can I sleep with you tonight?”
“Of course. Westley’s coming over. Should I tell him to stay home?” Just then, the door slides open, and West’s head pops out.
“There’s my girls.”
He squeezes beside us on the couch, lifting Aurora’s legs to lay them over his, then places his hands over our joint ones.
“What can I do?” Westley asks, his head resting against mine. “Do you two need anything?”
I shake my head. “I have everything.”
Aurora spins the ring on Westley’s finger as her head rests against my chest. “Mama?”
“Yeah, baby?” My heart squeezes. She only calls me Mama when she’s anxious or vulnerable. I can’t even remember when it stopped and morphed into Mum or Mother.
“Why did you call me Aurora?”
I press a kiss to the top of her head. “It was a few days after we first left. You were notorious for two a.m. feeds.” She chuckles, then leans her head back so she can look at me while I tell this part of our story. “The motels always played the same movies on repeat at the time, but the documentaries were always changing. I learnt a lot of cool facts during that time. One of the documentaries was on the Aurora Borealis, which was named after the goddess Aurora, the bringer of morning light.”
“Is that why our last name is Day?”
“No.” I shake my head. “There was an old Doris Day movie playing in the background when Royal was asking me what name to put on our fake ID’s.”
She chuckles, and the weight I’ve been carrying all these years seems to bind with the sound as it disappears into the air around us.
Aurora settles into my chest, and I rest my cheek on her head as I turn to look at Westley.
“I am so proud of you,” he mouths.
“Me too.” The words are fragile but not broken. New, but still strong.
Just like me.
44
“So, what do you think?” Claire leans her elbows on the counter, looking up at me with her bright, golden eyes.
All I can seem to manage is a sputtering of nonsense, completely speechless that Claire just asked me if I wanted to partner with her on the expansion of Parlour Tricks.
