He smiled at Rowan. It felt good to open up, and Henry Dale was listening with full attention too. They both seemed to expect him to continue. “I lost my dad a few years later. I have relatives on my mom’s side, but…I’ve never sought them out.”
“Why not?” Henry Dale asked.
For the first time, Eli admitted the truth out loud, what he’d barely acknowledged to himself. “If there’s no connection, if they just see me as an outsider, it will hurt so much that I don’t think I’ll ever recover from it. So I’m afraid to try.”
“Wow,” Rowan whispered. “This feels like a hugging moment. Do you want a hug?”
“Sure,” Eli said.
They leaned over to give him a careful side hug, easily achieved since Henry Dale had commandeered the whole other side of the booth. The man didn’t like sharing space.
“Better?” Rowan asked.
“Yeah. Thanks.” Eli did feel better.
Henry Dale cleared his throat. “If you want my opinion, you should go see them. You have family you’ve never met, and I’m sure they wonder about you.”
“If they even know I exist.”
“Then you’ll be an amazing surprise,” Rowan said.
“I’ll think about it.” He signaled for the check, and the other two let him pay without argument. At least one good thing had come from everyone finding out about his streak of success with various apps. “Hey, I don’t think I said so before, but I’m happy that your comic is taking off.”
Rowan visibly glowed over hearing that. “Between the discount for helping with Iris’s business and what I’m earning online, I’m pretty close to self-sufficient now. And it’s such a relief. My parents have been saying, ‘You have no marketable skills, no education,’ and they had me scared that I’d end up homeless if I tried to move out.”
“That’s bullshit,” Henry Dale said fiercely. “You’re smart and resourceful, and lots of people care about you.”
“Aw. You’re making me want to hug you too, HD.” Rowan grinned, likely knowing that the older man would rise to the bait.
Sure enough, Henry Dale pretended to glare. “The cheek!”
Taking that as his cue, Eli stood up and headed out, still thinking about what they’d said about his mom’s side of the family. Once they got in the truck, he said, “Maybe I don’t have to start with anything as big as a visit. I could look for cousins on the socials and reach out that way, see if anyone…”
“Cares?” Rowan suggested.
Eli started the truck and checked his rearview mirror. “Another issue is the language barrier. I feel guilty that my Spanish isn’t better, like I’m letting my mother down.”
“Then that’s what you work on,” Henry Dale said.
As Eli backed out of the restaurant parking lot, he shot the older man an inquiring look. “What?”
“Take Spanish lessons. If she’d lived, she would’ve taught you, and she would’ve introduced you to her family unless there was some bad blood you don’t know about. It’s best to assume otherwise if you didn’t hear anything.”
Eli considered. “I never did, no. To the best of my knowledge, they lost touch because of the distance. I’m sure my mom intended to reconnect, but then she got sick. I think Gamma said that my maternal grandfather had remarried, and Mom didn’t like her stepmother, so that’s why she stayed in the US. She was here on a student visa and then married my dad. But I’m pretty sure she had an older brother…”
“Families are complicated,” Rowan said with a sigh. “But if your granddad started a second family, you might have even more aunts and uncles and twice as many cousins.”
“Glad to see you’re taking my advice on this much,” Henry Dale added.
Eli grinned. “Don’t hold a grudge because I shot down your plan for me to reenact a scene from an old John Cusack movie.”
“Iris would so call the cops,” Rowan said. “And if she didn’t, Susan would.”
“That’s true enough. I truly do not like or understand that woman.” Henry Dale scowled as if the mere mention of her was enough to blight his good mood.
Rowan said, “Maybe she’s lonely.”
“Not everyone who’s lonely is also petty and mean,” Henry Dale pointed out.
While the other two chatted and bickered playfully, Eli thought about what he’d gained in St. Claire—friends who were like family, a chance to reconnect with people he’d written off, and possibly…love.
If he was brave enough to see it through.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
That moment of agony lasted a lifetime and no time at all.
Iris’s head went blurry, and she arched as the agony unspooled, leaving her soul to bleed. She opened her eyes again with great difficulty, locking onto Rain’s hand motions. As Iris struggled to grasp how she could feel pain in parts of her that had no nerve endings, Rain pulled what looked like a thin silver cord out of her body. The ephemeral chain writhed like a snake and then vanished in a puff of smoke. She blinked several times, wishing the world made sense, but it hadn’t since she’d found a door to fairyland in her grimy basement. Now weird things just kept happening.
“That’s how you were hidden from us,” Fen said.
“And how you were bound to this form, your magical nature stunted,” Rain added.
“We should start from the beginning, my love.”
Rain agreed with a regal little nod as Sally tiptoed in with a tray of tea and cookies. Bless Sally for taking this development in stride, Iris thought, until Sally caught her eye and mouthed, What the hell, as she backed out of the room.
Right, I’m on my own.
Both the fae took cursory sniffs of the drinks and didn’t touch them as Rain went on, “I’ll try to make this concise, as it covers a fair amount of fae history. Fen and I, we come from opposing houses.”
“Seelie and Unseelie?” Iris asked.
“Oh, you’ve read some legends! That’s delightful. Not exactly correct, but human versions of fae history rarely are,” Fen said.
Rain sighed with an expressive flutter of fingertips so graceful that they reminded Iris of leaves dancing on the wind. “So true. But then, they don’t even document their own history accurately, so what can one expect?”
Surreal. She returned to that word as she listened to her parents—her real fae parents?—talk blithely about inaccuracies in human historical records. “You were saying…”
Rain nodded. “Indeed. We tend to be less…direct in our communication styles, as we’re not under any time constraints, so we’re finding this dialogue a bit challenging.”
“You two had a Romeo and Juliet situation then? Your families disapproved of your relationship, I take it?” Iris had managed to glean that much.
Fen smiled—or tried to—a wholly strange and uncanny expression. “Precisely. So dear Willie made a go of the writing then? How fascinating.”
“You knew…Shakespeare?”
“He visited a few times when he was writing about the fae queen. What was that play called?” Rain fluttered their fingers, trying to remember.