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“Too much, perhaps.”

There it was.

The thing we'd both spent fifteen years trying not to say.

My dragon shifted restlessly beneath my skin, reacting to a memory neither of us could change.

“She was my mother. She was supposed to love me.”

“You know what I mean.”

Unfortunately, I did.

I remembered her waiting awake when I came home late from practice, calling repeatedly when buses were delayed, becoming increasingly distressed whenever hockey took me away for more than a night. At seventeen, I'd thought she was having trouble letting go of her only son.

Then I'd learned there might have been another explanation.

“She begged me not to leave.”

My father breathed out slowly. “Yes.”

“And I left anyway. Two days later, she was dead.”

“Maxim.”

I didn't want whatever came next. Reassurance had never worked because my father couldn't promise me my nature had played no part in what happened, and we both knew it.

He surprised me by not trying.

“I don't know how much being lifebound affected your mother,” he said. “I didn't know then and I don't know now. I know her attachment to you became stronger as you got older, and there were times when her fear of you leaving wasn't reasonable. I also know she was struggling in ways neither of us understood well enough.”

My hand tightened around the phone.

“You told me it was because of me.”

“I told you I believed being lifebound could be part of it.”

“I was seventeen, Papa. You told me that two days after she died.”

Another silence followed, and for the first time, there was something in my father's voice that sounded almost like regret.

“I was frightened too.”

That stopped me.

Papa had never said that.

“I'd lost my wife, and I had a son who was becoming something I didn't know enough about. There had been signs with other people around you already, and after your mother died, I thought the most important thing I could do was make sure you understood the danger.”

“The danger being me.”

“The danger being what could happen around you.”

There wasn't enough difference between those two things for me to find much comfort in it.

My father seemed to realize that because he didn't try to argue.

Instead, he said, “And now there is Melanie.”