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I hold up my hand, cutting him off. “What do you mean, gifts?”
I hadn’t gotten a darn thing, and if Tabitha had gotten anything from her vanished father, or anyone actually, I’d have definitely heard about it.
Hawke blinks at me. “The jewelry.” His forehead furrows. “We thought it’d be the easiest for you to sell. Every so often, he’d take the risk to slip back into your human world and leave gifts at his old home.”
“When?” I shake my head. A mistake. A miscommunication. It has to be.
“Since he left. The most recent was a few months ago now, but the piece was quite stately.”
Simple words, but they hold so much.
“Whoa, whoa.” I raise my hands in the air. “Uncle Mark told me Gran couldn’t see him. He never mentioned presents. And he said fae fade in our world, so he couldn’t stay? Just y’all, not your stuff?”
“He can’t stay long. That’s true. And it’s dangerous.” His gaze darkens. “If he were to get stuck or stay too long, he—” His hand balls into a fist. He nearly shakes. I’ve never seen such emotion, and all of it for Mark.
“Okay.” I’ll get to the bottom of that later. So help me if I’m not dragging his ass—butt—back with me to see his kids, at least for a few minutes. “This jewelry or whatever, we didn’t get it. There have been no gifts.”
Hawke practically leaps from the bed. “We need Mark.”
No kidding. He holds out his hand to me, and I scowl. “We are not teleporting.”
“Teleporting?” His head tilts to the side.
I roll my eyes and stalk past him into the hall. “Where is he?”
We find Mark in a library so cute and perfect with its floor-to-ceiling shelves and old book smell that I’d sigh and vow to stay forever if I wasn’t so perplexed.
“You brought us gifts?” I ask the moment we step into the room.
Mark jolts in his chair and nearly drops his book before he looks between Hawke and me.
“I mentioned you brought you family things to help them after you left,” Hawke says.
“Of course,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
I stare him down, my hands on my hips. Then, a thought strikes me so hard I nearly double over.
Virginia… She loved to deck herself out in gaudy jewelry, anything to attract her next man of the month. I always assumed it was fake. How else could she afford it?
My head spins, and I have to sit down.
Bad enough that she rarely spends any time with her kids or grandkids, pretty much none with her mother-in-law and me, but to keep valuables from them? Things meant to provide them a better life?
“Wren?” Mark leaves his book behind and crouches by my chair. “What is it?”
Hawke curses.
“Would those gifts have included a long strand of pink pearls? A silver chain with a blue stone like this big?” I estimate the size with my fingers.
“A sapphire, yes.”
Sapphire. I gasp. A stone that size would fetch a fortune. Another reason I’d never thought it real. How could it be? But all this time, all these years, she’d kept it to herself, a tool to win new lovers.
“Virginia.” Mark fills her name with all the bitterness churning within me.
All I can do is nod.
“She never told us. Kept them for herself. Never sold them that I know of, surely not for what they’d be worth.” Though, as I say it, I can’t help but wonder about that too. She loved to gush about the trips her lover of the moment took her on from time to time. Hawaii. The Bahamas. It seemed a lot for someone from our little town, but maybe her man of the moment hadn’t been the one paying after all.
