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Her eyes fell upon the third and largest book, a historical and pictorial local archive.
“I’ve saved the best for last, Luna,” Herald said before placing his hands along the book’s spine. “Are you ready for this?”
“Just open the book,” Luna said.
Herald sighed, then flipped the book open to the bookmarked page. It took a while to make anything out. The pages were a disorienting mess of pictures and words, as though long before any concern for readability standards ever existed.
But there, in the corner of the page, was the spitting image of Luna. Adrian felt his heart stop. There was no mistaking it. She had the same deep green eyes and flowing blonde hair.
“This is your grandmother, Luna,” Herald said, with Adrian unable to speak. “She’s still alive. And I’m not even going to tell you where I found this.”
SEVENTEEN
LUNA
“Come on, Luna. What’s the worst that could happen?”
After Herald had left, Adrian and Luna had gone to bed.
The following morning, they sat alone in Adrian’s study. Luna’s fingers loosely moved over her phone, playing entertaining reel after reel to distract her brain from the source of her anxiety.
She had a grandmother.
For much of her life lately, she had considered herself the sole survivor of her family. Her dad had grown cold and callous after her mother’s death, a small remnant of the man she had once considered her father.
And now he was dead too.
“I know, I know. I’ll get to it, okay? I just have to …”
Luna stared transfixed, watching a man cobble together 1950’s recipes on her phone screen. He dropped every ingredient into the bowl with a corny dad joke, and when he had finally assembled the food, it looked terrible, a strange mixture of cornmeal, gelatin, and mayonnaise.
“Mmm,” he said with a disgusted look on his face as he brought a spoon to the concoction and ate it, giving a thumbs up. “This was totally worth the forty dollars.”
Another video played, and she wondered if her grandmother had ever eaten any of this. There was so much she wanted to know, and yet her mind couldn’t stop imagining the worst-case scenarios.
They had hunted down traces of Luna’s grandmother through some shrewd detective work, but it had taken a few hours. Public records had guided them to an old landline number, though they couldn’t confirm if it was still active.
“You’re never going to know,” Adrian said, hovering over her office chair.
She hadn’t seen him get up from his desk.
Luna looked up from her phone right as the man dropped a large glob of marshmallow topping onto a greased pan. Looking down at the clock on her phone, she realized she had wasted two hours doing absolutely nothing.
“What?”
“Luna, just call her. Please. Otherwise, you’re never going to know. You can sit here for the rest of eternity if you like, but you’re never going to know if you don’t call.”
It was easy for him to say. He wasn’t in her position.
What if her grandmother wanted nothing at all to do with her and had intentionally separated herself from the family? What if her grandmother was an abusive person, on par with her father, and she was just inviting another toxic presence into her life at the worst possible moment?
Still, she supposed she didn’t have much to lose. At worst, she was down one grandmother, which was exactly where she already was.
At best, she could find the guidance she had so long coveted and finally understand her roots.
She realized she had let the video replay several times. In her anxiety, she had frozen entirely, neither acknowledging Adrian nor the task at hand nor even the videos she was using to distract herself. She was even drowning out her wolf’s complaints inside her, which wasn’t easy to do.
Luna rose from her chair, kicking it back from behind her, and lifted a singular notecard from the desk surface. On it was written her grandmother’s phone number, or what she hoped was still her grandmother’s phone number.
