“I guess so.” I swallow my toast. Somehow, talking logistics feels easier, or at least preferable to being in my own head. Manageable. “But doesn’t that just put us back where we started? Like, if I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t have to go to the Lady in the first place, would I? I’d know what I was and know how to make myself…be what I have to be. Right?”
No one says anything.
Which must mean I’m right.
“So we did all that for nothing?” I add, a desperate edge to my voice.
“Maybe not,” Kingston says. Then, more definitively, “No.”
I don’t believe him.
“We’ll fill in Dr. Emrys,” he goes on. “Perhaps see if there’s anything he can add?—”
Of course. Pro forma, at this point, but sure. I nod, nod, nod, and clutch my coffee. Wishing it could be clearer, wishing I justknew,wishing foroncein my life that someone would just tell me, flat out, what I needed to be and do to make everyone happy and everything all right.
“And I’ll go back to my Vivian files,” Morgan’s saying, dropping the jars she was idly stacking into a little tower. “Biographical stuff, I mean, not just magical. In case that turns up a hint or two.” She glances at Kingston, who gives a small, affirmativewhy-notkind of shrug.
“What about the other two?” He frowns. “Wherearethe other two?”
“You mean the other fifty percent of this dream team?” Kai glances around the kitchen, shrugging. “Well, next time Pretty Boy’s awake before the rest of us will be the first time.” He gnaws on his lip, pensive. “But it’s not like Cal to just disappear on us.”
TWENTY
CALLAHAN
I’m about halfwaythrough the dedication ceremony when it hits me.
“We all know the saying,” Father Mendez is saying into the microphone. “Life began in a garden.”
It’sspring, I think, as the audience murmurs a polite laugh at his opener. That’swhy everything looks so different.
I guess in hindsight I’d been noticing all morning. The winding roads out of Sarrasford and out of the mountains got gradually less and less white, then less and less gray-brown, until finally there was some sunshine, some clear sky, as I pushed the gas on the Volvo and glanced down at my phone to make sure I didn’t miss any turns. When I parked in the lot by St. Ann’s, the air was so warm I left my coat in the car and walked around back in just my blazer and tie.
But now, seated here in the front row of white folding chairs, looking from Father Mendez at the podium to the backdrop of the green leaves and green vines and orange, red, yellow flowers and the bright blue of the sky, Ifeelit.
“…and that this memorial garden will grow as the community around it continues to flourish,” Father Mendez is saying, his words fading into the applause that swells from the audience, and I remember to bang my hands together, too, just a second or two late.
It’s nice. Really nice, what they did with the space: I was thinking it’d be one or two scraggly flowerbeds, some popsicle sticks painted by kids jammed in the dirt, maybe a tomato plant or something in the summer. But this is agardengarden, with a pebble path and clipped box hedges and metal arches and little brass signs staked at the corners: this way to the pollinators, this way to the vegetables, that kind of thing. You’d honestly never realize it used to be a weedy empty lot unless you’d been here long enough to remember the before. I barely do, even.
And benches. There’s benches, nice ones with wrought iron legs, including one right up front.
IN LOVING MEMORY
SEAN & MEGGIE O’BRIAN
I stare at it, hands in my jacket pockets, biting hard on the inside of my cheek.
But I don’t cry. I never cry. Not on purpose, or anything. I just…don’t.
“Cal!”
Out of nowhere, a bunch of kids scramble up to me, kids I kind of recognize from the neighborhood, little brothers and sisters, but older now, bigger, after some growth spurts and lost teeth. And they have a thousand questions.
“Do you really fight with swords?”
“Do you live in a castle now?”
“Do you have a girlfriend at college?”
