Page 74 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Cornelia laughed brightly at nothing, and said the light was going and they really must be off, and the tour ended.

Aidan found him afterwards, watching the dark car pull away down the long drive with Toby waving from the gravel and Maris beside him with one hand raised.

“So,” Aidan said mildly. “That was fun.”

He didn’t respond.

“For a second there.” Aidan rocked back on his heels. “By the ferns. I thought you were going to eat him.”

“I considered it.”

Aidan huffed a laugh, and then stopped because Garrick hadn’t laughed. Aidan studied him, the teasing smirk absent for once.

“You didn’t fix it,” Aidan said. “Whatever they’re trying to do. You could’ve made it go away and you didn’t.”

“No.”

“That was hard.”

“Yes.”

Aidan nodded slowly. He clapped Garrick on the shoulder, and went to his truck, and left without saying anything else.

Maris came up the drive with Toby’s hand in hers, both of them looking wrung out. Garrick picked Toby up without being asked, and the three of them went into the house together as the light failed. They ate supper, and Toby had a bath, and Garrick read him a story with the boy tucked against his chest. The crushed cardboard wing retired quietly to the trash while Toby slept, and Garrick had already sketched out how to build him better ones with real hinges, before he could stop himself.

Fixing things, he thought. It’s all I know how to do.

He carried Toby back to the cottage and stayed until Maris slept. And then, instead of going up to the roof, instead of going to stone, instead of any of the things he’d spent fifteen years doing to avoid it, he walked back through the dark house to the west corridor. He stopped in front of the closed door.

He’d stood here before. Twice this autumn, at least, hand raised, and turned away.

He put his hand on the door. The wood was cool. Behind it, he could feel, the way he’d always been able to feel it, the specific weight of stone that no longer held anyone. A gargoyle always knew. He’d never once been able to pretend the room was empty.

He opened the door and went in and sat down on the floor.

The room held very little. A chair his mother had loved. A window that faced west, because that was the direction she was buried. And Corwin Stonehaven, in grey stone, exactly as he had been the morning Garrick came home to visit a father and found a statue instead. The broad shoulders. The folded wings. The strong angular face so like the one Garrick saw every morning. His father had chosen the stone. He had given in to grief and Garrick had come home too late and found him already gone, and he’d shut the door and not opened it for fifteen years. He could forgive being left by death. He could not forgive being left on purpose.

Garrick sat on the floor in front of him and did not weep. He didn’t make a speech. There was no one to make it to. The stone was only stone now, whatever it had once been.

“I found you,” he said, after a while, to the quiet. “And I left.”

Behind the wall, in a small dark cottage, a female and a boy who might be gone by spring were sleeping. A good school, a good house, a good offer, everything a loving family could give. All of it four hours south, in a life with no room in it for grey skin and folded wings. He had refused to buy them. He had done the hardest thing he knew how to do, which was nothing.

He stayed until the moon rose, and then he stood. He looked once more at his father’s face, and didn’t reach for it.

“I’m not walking away twice,” he said, and left the door open behind him.

CHAPTER 25

The prospectus sat on the kitchen table where Cornelia had left it, glossy and rectangular and perfectly aligned. Maris knew she hadn’t forgotten it. Cornelia did not forget things. She left them—a book, a card, a school in the city with a boy’s place already held. She left them so that Maris had to be the one to pick them up and put them somewhere, and every day she didn’t decide would feel like a small failure. It was a genius she had spent six years underestimating.

Ashby Preparatory, the cover said, in letters the color of old money, with a photograph of a brick building older than the country. She didn’t open it.

“Is Grandmother coming back tomorrow?”

Toby was at the table with his spoon halfway to a bowl of cereal, hair everywhere, looking at her with Jeff’s chin and her eyes. It was such an ordinary question. She had to turn to the sink and run the tap.

“Not tomorrow, baby.”