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My cousin stands in the doorway, as wide eyed and shocked as I am. Tabitha had said he was coming home soon, but I never got the date.
He’s here though. Really here.
All at once, my fear and hesitation are gone. I leap the remaining step and rush into his waiting arms. His embrace is crushing but comforting all the same as pent-up emotion bubbles out of me in sobbing tears. He’s just like I remember with his close-cropped hair and sturdy build—strong, reliable, a pillar of support if ever there was one.
“Is that my Wren?” The sound of Gran’s voice breaks me anew.
I let out another sob before pulling away from Matt and rubbing at my tear-streaked face. I peer past him into the house, blinking as my eyes adjust to the dimmer light.
It wasn’t my imagination. Gran sits in her favorite chair, looking as well as ever with her glasses propped in her short, white perm and wearing her favorite violet outfit. Tabitha stands next to her chair, one hand over her gaping mouth. A tumbler of water falls from her other hand to flood the carpets, but I barely notice the mess.
They’re here too. They’re alive.
I detach from Matt and rush to Gran, falling to my knees in front of her chair and wrapping her in a careful but fierce hug. The sobbing comes even harder, all the emotion I bottled up in Faery springing free at the sight of my family.
“Wren. We thought—” Tabitha sniffles. “I worried you—” Another sharp inhale cuts off her words.
The front door squeaks closed as Matt joins us inside.
“I knew you were alive,” Gran says. She pets my hair like she did when I was a child, smoothing her wrinkled hand down its length. “I just knew it. My Wren is a fighter, I told people. She’ll come back to me.”
“I did,” I say through my tears, my face still buried against her. “I’m here.”
“Where were you?” Matt asks. “All this time…”
They thought I was dead. I can hear it in his voice, in Tabitha’s.
But not Gran. She believed, even when she probably shouldn’t have.
Finally, I pull away from her and wipe at my face again, trying to bring my tears under control.
“The kids?” I ask Tabitha. If they were here, surely, I’d have seen or heard them by now.
“With Robbie,” she says, still staring at me like I’m a ghost. He must have come home too.
“You’re all right, dear?” Gran asks.
I nod. “Yes. Better than now that I know you’re all safe.”
“It’s you we were worried about.” Tabitha wipes under her eyes, trying to hide the tears slipping free. “Scared us all half to death. I really thought…” She shakes her head again, leaving the thought unspoken. “What on earth happened?”
“You might want to sit down,” I say. “This might be a little hard to believe.”
And so, I tell them my story—the simple version of it anyway. I leave out the war, the battles, much of the magic, anything that might complicate what happened. I leave out Uncle Mark too. That’s a whole can of worms I can’t quite spill yet. Tabitha is close to breaking down as it is, and bringing up her lost dad? She’d probably faint on me.
I hadn’t planned to tell them the truth. I thought I might tell them some recluse in the woods took me in and nursed me back to health.
But they’re my family. I love them.
They deserve the truth, no matter how difficult or strange it may be.
They listen. There are plenty of shocked looks, curious glances, and questions, but not one of them calls me crazy or thinks I’ve lost it, as I feared. Actually, they seem rather openminded to the whole idea of Faery, all things considered.
“A whole different world,” Matt says. It’s one of the first comments he’s made. At some point, he got up from his chair and started to pace. Now he leans against the wall by the window, occasionally glancing out as if the world might have changed completely during the time I told them my tale. I guess, in a way, it has.
“It sounds thrilling,” Gran says, leaning back in her recliner, a satisfied look on her face. “And that handsome gentleman of yours. Sounds like you found quite the man.”
“Gran,” I groan. Somehow, it never gets easier to talk to her about guys, no matter how old I get.
