Her eyes popped open. “You see them?”
“Oh, yeah.” He winked at me. “When your mummy and I were little, we found a magical forest.”
I rolled my eyes. The thick grove of trees behind the old convict outbuildings was littered with fallen logs and fat croaking frogs. A swamp, really. It stank to high heaven out there. There was nothing “magical” about that forest.
Callan shot me a challenging grin. He knew I hated that place. “If it’s not past your bedtime, we can search for fairies. But!” He tickled Matilda’s belly. “Once you know the secret, promise you’ll only go there with a grown-up, okay?”
“Trolls there?” she asked in an excited whisper.
With his brows furrowed, Callan tapped his chin as if he were thinking it oververyseriously. “You know, I’ve neverseena troll, but you can never be too careful in magical forests. You’d better stomp your boots when we get closer to scare any away.”
“Where go?”
“There”—he pointed straight ahead—“to those trees.”
Matilda wriggled out of his arms and marched through the grass with her arms swinging. Trolls or not, she was brave.
Callan bumped his shoulder into mine as we walked behind her. “How was your day?”
“Quiet. You?”
“Less quiet when I got home.”
“Are Bronte and Mim arguing again?”
“You guessed it. The contract settled, and Mim is coming to terms with the fact that Bronte’s never going back to nursing. You can imagine. I never realized how much Lila…” His lips flattened, and that was where his thought ended.
My heart sang to hear someone else say Lila’s name. Jeremy hated it when I mentioned her. Every thought about her was me refusing to deal with my grief, according to him.
“Finish what you were going to say,” I urged Callan.
He gave me a long look but smiled softly and said, “I was going to say, Lila must have been buffering some of their arguments… Or maybe the three of them were always too busy gossiping to be bothered to fight as much.”
“Why didn’t you say that?”
He lifted a shoulder.
“Cal… Do you think I haven’t gotten over Lila?”
His brows scrunched together when he flicked me a sideways glance. “Why do you have to?”
“She’s gone…”
“That doesn’t mean you have to forget her. I was keeping my comments to myself because I know how much of a toll those last few months took on you. I see it on your face when you’re up at the house.”
“I…”
“I get why you don’t venture down to their old room. But to me, that’s love. It hurt you to see her get so sick and not be able to do more to help. And now, she’s gone, and you miss her.”
“I do.”
“And isn’t that okay?”
“I… don’t know…”
I let my thoughts float like the moths flitting in the night air. Jeremy never understood why I needed to pause sometimes because the pain of losing Lila seized so tight around my lungs I could hardly breathe. He was impatient. Every discussionwas aboutprogress. Instead of letting me remember random moments with Lila, like giggling over her crush on Cole or sleeping with the lights on after watching too many scary movies, Jeremy shut me down and told me it had been long enough. How many days wereenoughon his scale? A thousand wasn’t enough for me…
The forest loomed ahead, and Callan picked up his pace to race a few steps ahead of Matilda. He crouched close to the grass.
