Page 33 of Big Witch Energy

He wanted Caroline to be happy. She deserved that, but he didn’t know if he could sit back and watch that happen with someone else. And he knew that made him sad and small, but he wasn’t sure he was good enough to put his own feelings aside. He didn’t know if he loved her enough to let her go a second time. And he did love her. He’d known that all those years ago when he left Starfall, he would never stop.

And yet…the idea of her making a life here on the island with someone else…

He stood at his kitchen door, checking his medical bag for supplies, sighing. “Get your shit together, Hoult. Be a grown-up. She’s gone through enough. Let her be happy.”

He steeled his spine and walked outside, fully prepared to march over to the Rose and tell her family off for pushing her too far, too early…only to see Caroline through one of the side windows of Shaddow House—one of the huge glass panels of the atrium only visible from his side porch—lounging on a chaise with a blanket around her shoulders, staring down intently as if she was reading.

Clearly, his gut was an idiot.

Ben blinked as his brain tried to keep up with what he was seeing. “Huh.”

She was resting. Following doctor’s orders. Not working. He would get to know this woman, Riley, and learn her ways.

So if Caroline was in Shaddow House…wait, where were his kids? Were his kids inside Shaddow House? A sudden sense of dread and yet, acute jealousy, struck him right in the middle. He’d wanted to get in that place for years—even though he sensed there was something not quite right about it—and it had only taken his kids a couple of days? Also, he was a terrible father.

Ben dashed down the steps of his cottage and through the gate of Shaddow House. He felt a mounting sense of something important and potentially dangerous building at the base of his brain stem. It sounded like an awful lot of talking inside that ornate front door, especially for a house that was only supposed to be home to two people. It struck him as odd that such a large house didn’t have at least one security camera pointed at the door. But if there were cameras keeping Shaddow House safe, he couldn’t see them.

He knocked on the door and the talking seemed to soften, like Ben had walked into a party with toilet paper on his shoe. He could hear whispered conversation from the general direction of the atrium and then heard footsteps. Riley answered, looking confused. “Hi, Ben.”

“Hi, I was going to go check on Caroline at the Rose, but…she’s not there? She’s here, which I’m very confused about. Also, are my kids in your house?” Ben asked.

“Welp, Caroline’s mom damn near talked her into going into work today,” Riley shouted over her shoulder in a very pointed fashion that Ben thought was probably for Caroline’s benefit. “And your kids—rightly so—called me and ratted her out. So, I talked her into coming here, and now that the building has been cleared, your kids went over to the Rose to help with the cleanup. Caroline’s mom is supervising them, and since you told them they were going to be responsible for helping Caroline there, too, we thought that would be OK?”

Relief and a little bit of disappointment filled Ben. He’d hoped that the kids would keep him updated on this sort of thing. But living here on Starfall was supposed to give them more freedom, he reminded himself…and at least they were doing something productive? “No, no, it’s fine. I’m just, uh, adjusting to the idea of loosening the parental reins a little bit.”

Riley beamed at him. “It’s nice that you worry. It means you care.”

“And the kids were right to rat you out, Caroline!” Ben called into the house, making Riley snicker. “I’m very proud of my network of informants—who inform everybody but me.”

“I guess you need to come in to examine Caroline, huh?” Riley said.

“Well, being within ten feet of the patient is an essential part of the in-person examination process,” Ben said, nodding. Riley glanced around, and almost looked like she was asking for permission, before she finally nodded and opened the door wider for him.

He felt an odd electric buzz up his spine as he entered the house. The interior lived up to all of his expectations, between the opulent, colorful décor, the strange antiques—a huge grandfather clock, a suit of actual armor, a…bronze stork playing a saxophone? None of it seemed to match, but it all belonged together. Except for the stork, that was just freaking weird.

Caroline was seated in an airy light-filled room lined with glass. The space—and its ferns and seating—seemed to be oriented around a stone fountain of a woman in a flower crown kissing a skull. He could see why someone living on Starfall would want to have a room like this to prevent winter blues. Sometimes, being cooped up within four walls for months on end could get sort of…intense.

Caroline was surrounded by books and notebooks with three framed sketches lined up against the base of the fountain nearby. She seemed to be comfortable, seated and warm, with a steaming mug of tea at her elbow and an adorable pair of black-framed glasses perched on her nose. She was staring down at a large copper bowl on the table to her right, frowning. That was sort of strange given that the bowl was half-full of bits of rose quartz?

It was the same expression Mina had when doing trigonometry homework. Wait, was Caroline doing homework? About rose quartz? Oh, no. Riley seemed nice, but he hoped she wasn’t trying to “heal” Caroline’s ankle with woo-woo stuff she found online.

Caroline smiled up at him through those adorable glasses and his heart did a familiar beat-skip-beat. “Your kids are working their butts off right now, helping my mom box up the unbroken glassware and plates—which is especially important, since she only has the one working shoulder—so be prepared for some grumbling when you get home,” Caroline told him. “Mina has sent me ‘fire emoji,’ ‘squid emoji,’ and ‘foot emoji.’ I don’t know what that means, but it can’t be good.”

“Mina is texting you?” Ben asked.

“Yeah, Josh sent ‘burrito emoji,’ ‘snowflake emoji,’ and what looked like a face made out of dotted lines,” Caroline said, holding up her phone to show him. “But I think at this point, they might just be messing with me. Is this really how kids communicate?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Ben told her. “It is possible they’re just messing with you.”

Both of his kids were texting Caroline. (And calling Riley, apparently.) He didn’t know how to feel about that. It was good that they had adults they trusted, and that he trusted, that they could talk to—but wasn’t it also adding more complications to all of their lives?

“As you can see, I am sitting, with my foot elevated, not lifting anything heavier than these books,” she told him.

“Under duress,” Edison Held commented as he came down the steps. He smiled at Ben as if it wasn’t strange for other people to be under Riley’s roof, but there was a note of discomfort in his eyes as he shook Ben’s hand. “A lot of duress. I had to bring her some titles from special collections that I’m not technically allowed to remove from the public library to get her to sit still.”

“The betrayal,” Caroline gasped. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”

Edison shrugged. “Well, being a literary outlaw, I am going to go back to the library to hide out. I’m going to pack up more boxes of books to make way for when Cole…eventually gets here.”

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