“I spent a bunch of time in the system.”
“Funny, you don’t strike me as an ex-con.”
“Not that kind of system.”
“What kind, then?”
“The kind where you learn that messing up gets you noticed—and not in a good way. The kind where asking for help brands you as needy and helpless. A burden at best. A target at worst.”
I lower my gaze, hoping he can’t see the memories flashing behind it. All the moving around I had to do as a teen, keeping my head down, my mouth shut, my magic on lockdown, hoping I wouldn’t commit some unintentional infraction to upset the balance. To get kicked out of whatever temporary home I’d been shunted off to. And Mr. Roach, the aptly named social worker whose favorite after-school activity was leering at me over his grimy glasses while reminding me how difficult it was to place teenage girls because all of us were just a bunch of—and I quote—money-grubbing, backstabbing whores-in-training.
No, not all the foster placements were horrible. Some of the families really did want to help, and tried their best to make an impossible situation slightly more bearable. But none of them knew about my magic, none of them lasted for long, and none of them ever felt likehome. Not the one I’d lost when Gigi died, and not the one I eventually found—thank the goddess—in Wayward Bay.
“I ran the minute I turned eighteen,” I say. “I was in the midwest at the time, and something just told me to head east. I had no money, no friends or family, nothing but the clothes on my back and a few things my grandmother had left me—things I guarded with my life. So I followed that tug inside me, made it all the way to a diner about an hour from the Bay. The waitress took pity on me—brought me a meal on the house. Told me to hang out until closing, so I did. I thought she might offer me a place to stay, but then, a few minutes after closing, Althea showed up. She said she was a witch, like me. That she and her sisters knew I was coming—they’d been waiting for me and asked the waitress to keep an eye out.”
Devlin’s eyes soften. “You’re lucky to have them in your life, Violet.”
“All of us are. My sisters… That’s pretty much how we all ended up in Wayward Bay over the years. Each of us finding our way, following the magic. The aunts say it calls to us, right when we need it most.” I swipe a lone tear from my cheek and smile. “Coming here, to the B&B, meeting the other aunts, my sisters… It was the first time since Gigi died that I felt like I was home. Truly home. And no matter what happens, I can’t… I can’t risk it.”
“Risk what, love?”
“Messing up again.”
“Ah. I see.”
“See what?”
“You’re not afraid of messing up, mushroom. You’re afraid that if your family—the women who’vechosenyou after years of the rejection you endured as a child—discovered that you’re ever-so-slightlylessthan perfect, they might abandon you, just like all those other so-called families did.”
His words are a volley of arrows that pierce my heart, but I’m shaking my head anyway. “It’s different,” I insist. “Totally different.”
“How so?”
“I’m not a needy child anymore, Devlin. I’m a grown woman who owns her own business. I’m a witch with access to magic most people only dream about, and unlike that lost and lonely fourteen-year-old girl,Iknow how to harness it. I should be able to figure this out on my own.”
“Says who?”
“Says… everyone?”
“Even if that were true, don’t you think making mistakes along the way is part of figuring it out?”
“I don’t have time for mistakes. I let my financial situation get out of hand, and now I’m in one hell of a mess.”
“It’s okay to be messy.Lifeis messy. That’s part of what makes it worth living.”
“Says the immortal with no fear of death.”
“Death, no, you’ve got me there.” He tucks a finger under my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze again. Then, in a soft whisper that almost breaks me, “But loss? That’s something we’reallfaced with, mushroom. Even me.”
Another tear escapes. He catches it with his thumb.
“You don’t have to be perfect, love,” he whispers. “You just have to be real.”
I shake my head. “I made her a promise, Devlin.”
“Who? Your gran?”
I nod. In Gigi’s final days, I slept on a cot in her hospital room, right next to her bed. She was pretty out of it by the end, but one night, I woke up at three a.m. and found her watching me, her gaze as sharp and clear as it had ever been.
