Page 72 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“There’s a place for him at Ashby Prep, Jefferson’s old school. I spoke to the head myself, and they’ll take him in the spring. There’s no question for a boy of his caliber.” The tiniest hesitation. “Now, Jefferson’s trust doesn’t release until Toby is twenty-one, but Lawton has spoken to the lawyers, and as sole trustee he can release it early, for the boy’s education. All of it. Ashby, and then whatever comes after. He would never want for anything. Not ever.”

“Jeff hated Ashby,” she said.

A pause exactly long enough to be heard.

“Jefferson,” Cornelia said, “was very happy there.”

Lawton leaned in, his face kind and determined. “And a house, Maris. Near us. Not charity, just a house in the boy’s name, three streets over, so he’ll grow up with family. His cousins. His grandparents. His father’s people.” His voice broke on that, just slightly. “We lost Jefferson. We can’t lose the last of him to four hours away up a mountain.”

The fire in the small woodstove popped. Toby breathed, slow and deep, in the trundle bed.

It was, she understood, a genuinely good offer. That was the terrible part. There was no villain in the room. The Pinckneys had offered an excellent school they were certain Jeff had loved. Money that was already, in every moral sense, Toby’s. A house, free and clear. Grandparents who would drive four hours and kneel in a coat that had never touched dirt because they loved a boy that much. Everything a child could want, and everything she had lain awake worrying she couldn’t give him. Stability. Security. A floor under his feet that couldn’t drop out.

All of it. On one condition, so obvious they hadn’t even had to say it out loud.

That he leave Fairhaven Falls.

There would be no more festivals. No cardboard wings, no Sara on her knees in the dirt, no baby in a bee costume, no gate in the garden wall. No enormous gentle stone male laughing helplessly in a crowd because a boy had chosen to be like him.

“You’d take him to the city,” she said, and her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “And I’d… come. To the house three streets over.”

“Of course you’d come.” Cornelia’s smile arrived, warm and final. “Darling. You’re his mother. We’d never dream of separating you.” A pause, gentle as a knife. “We only think—for him—that his life is bigger than a little town full of, well.” She gestured faintly at the window and the town beyond it. “Don’t you want more for him than this, Maris? Truly. In your heart. Don’t you want him to have everything?”

And Maris sat in the firelight with her sleeping son’s crushed cardboard wing across the trundle bed, and could not, for one long and terrible moment, find a single word to say that wouldn’t break something.

CHAPTER 24

Garrick had watched a number of men decide he was safe the instant they learned what he was worth, and he had never particularly minded it before meeting Toby’s grandparents. He minded it then and he minded it again across the Inn’s breakfast table the next morning.

“You’ve done work in Charleston,” Lawton said, to the business section when Garrick and Maris returned for breakfast. “Nothing south of Broad, though. Who do you know down there?” He turned a page with the ease of a male who assumed he knew the answer. “Because I could make a call.”

He minded the way Cornelia poured coffee for Maris and said, just a splash for you, you take it plain, don’t you, so unfussy, and made it sound like a diagnosis. He minded, most of all, what happened to Maris in a room with these two people. She got smaller. Not physically, but something in her shrank and her smile turned careful. The female who had shouted at him over a Bobcat, who called a collapsed wall a habitat and won, sat at that table with her hands in her lap and managed the situation.

He had never seen her manage before. He hated it.

He said little. He was good at saying little. He drank his coffee and watched, and what he watched was an old, well-oiled machine, running smoothly because it had been running Maris’s marriage and most of her widowhood. No blow landed hard enough to name, but each of them landed.

Toby, mercifully, was immune. Toby had slept eleven hours and woken up a different boy, spilling over with the excitement of sharing the town he loved.

“—and Grondar can lift a car, Grandmother. He lifted a whole hay wagon so Elara could find the bracelet she dropped, and Ben has ears like this,”—arms flung wide—“and Barclay’s daddy is a werewolf but the nice kind, Miss Sara says all the kinds are nice mostly, and when I grow up I’m going to have wings like Mr. Garrick, real ones, and⁠—”

“How… wonderful,” Cornelia said.

Garrick heard the half-second delay before wonderful. The way she looked to the side, as though something unpleasant had been set down on the table that she was too polite to acknowledge. Lawton’s smile stayed fixed a beat too long.

“Real ones,” Lawton said, with a small chuckle. “Well. We’ll see what you want when you’re older. Boys change their minds a hundred times.”

“I won’t change my mind,” Toby said.

“Toby,” Maris murmured, managing.

“He won’t,” he said quietly.

Lawton looked at him, and the chuckle turned into the kind of smile males used on business associates whose opinions they intended to ignore.

“He’s five, Mr. Stonehaven. At five I wanted to drive a fire engine.”

“I wanted to fly when I was five,” he said. “I do.”