Page 67 of Truly Madly Magically

The fact that there are too many options hits me. Hard and wrong.

Why don’t I know where home is?

I’ve spent years avoiding that question, ever since my father left the house I grew up in and nothing was ever the same. That isn’t to say it didn’t have upsides, but it still wasn’t the same.

Tonight it breaks over me, in me. Into a long, painful sob. Into tears I can’t stop.

I cover my face with my hands and try to find a spell to hide this, but it just doesn’t come. It doesn’t matter how mortified I am. The sobs wrack my body.

Over and over again.

Zander must have pulled over, because a few seconds later, he’s moving me into his lap. I want to fight him, but I don’t. I can’t.

For the first time in my life, I cry in front of another person who isn’t my mom.

I cry directly into his chest. What else is there to do?

He tucks me under his chin, wrapping me in his strong arms and holding me close. He doesn’t tell me not to cry. He doesn’t tell me it will all be okay.

Zander doesn’t say any of that. He just holds me and calls me baby and kisses my hair.

I cry until I’m weak. Until I’m spent.

Until there’s no pretending I don’t know that his shirt is soaked with my stupid tears and almost worse, I am curled up in his lap in a truck on the side of the highway.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

He laughs a little, still smoothing a big hand over my hair. Then he presses a kiss to the crown of my head. “Buck up, El. We’ve got one more stop to make.”

I can’t bring myself to look at him as I crawl back to my seat. Like an embarrassing morning after, but without any of the good stuff to reflect on in the shower.

“We need to go tell my dad,” he says.

I’m surprised enough by that to look over at him as he pulls the truck back out onto the road. “You haven’t told him already?”

He shakes his head. “I thought it would make him sad. And it will.”

He turns to look at me then, and his eyes are a blaze of silver fury.

Not at me, but on my behalf.

It makes me want to melt. Maybe I do. I’m too waterlogged to tell.

“It will also make him happy, Ellowyn, like it should.” His voice is hard then, the kind of hardness he never shows my dad to his face. “He’s going to be sad because Mom isn’t here to see it, but this is also going to be his grandkid. And to him? That’s going to be pure joy and happiness. I promise you.”

17

IT’S NOT THE first time I’ve stood in front of the old Rivers house, set back from the riverbank but within walking distance of the ferry, feeling nervous and unsure of my place here. Zelda was always about warm hugs and obvious delight at the sight of me, but Zack tended toward gruff. I never quite knew what he thought of me back then.

I still don’t. I’m not sure this announcement of ours is going to help. Zander seems to be pinning a lot of hope on it, and I wish he wouldn’t. I feel like there’s a high probability that I’ll need to soothe away his tears in fifteen minutes, and nobody wants that.

I’ve glamoured all traces of tears off my face, and just wish that there were glamours for aching hearts too. Zander has his arm around me as we walk toward the house, and I know I should say something about that. I should point out that it’s not only too familiar, too intimate, but it’s definitely hurtling down a slippery slope at the very least, but I can’t quite get my mouth to do my bidding. Maybe because he hasn’t mentioned the crying.

I tell myself it’s because he knows that if he did I’d poof myself away. Immediately.

Why didn’t I think of that when the crying dam inside me broke wide-open?

Zander doesn’t knock at his father’s door. He walks right inside the house, calling out for his dad as he goes. He sweeps me along with him, straight back into the kitchen, so there’s not much for me to do but go along with him and notice that nothing much has changed since the last time I was here, over a decade ago. Like the place has been frozen in time, or in my memories.

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