“It did,” she said. “But it wasn’t the town’s fault.” Her glowing eyes had almost fully dimmed now, though the halo of power around her lingered like an afterimage. “It was mine. I let myself shrink. I told myself stories about what magic was supposed to look like, and because I wasn’t that, I decided I didn’t count.”
My pulse thudded in my ears. That sounded… unpleasantly familiar.
My dad moved closer to her, slow and steady, like a man approaching a scared animal.
“You did good,” he said quietly. “The hit from the mirrors threw half the town off balance. The Wards bucked. But this house stayed put.” He nodded toward the new chalk lines. “That’s you.”
She looked at him, suspicion worrying the corners of her eyes. “You’re not just saying that so I don’t unravel, are you?”
“I’m saying that because I nearly bounced off the porch when I tried to rush in,” he said. “And I’m me. I lived in this cottage as a dog for a year. The house knows my paws. For it to shove me back, you must’ve given it a spine of steel.”
Something warm and aching bloomed in my chest.
“Mom,” I said, taking a tentative step closer. “What did you… do? Exactly?”
She exhaled, some of the fight leaving her shoulders.
“I anchored you,” she said. “Or tried to. When I felt that pull through your mark, I knew you were touching something bigger than you meant to. I reached along the bond and grabbed on.” Her mouth twisted. “Apparently, I grabbed onto the wrong side.”
“The priestess,” I guessed.
“And Elira,” she said. “At different points. It was like standing between two tides, both of them convinced they were the moon.”
The image made me dizzy. “Why didn’t you tell me you could do that?”
She shrugged, a small, helpless motion. “Because I didn’t know until I tried. Because I was afraid if I told you and it went wrong, you’d blame me. Because…” Her throat bobbed. “Because I didn’t want to disappoint you. Again.”
A laugh escaped me—a short, incredulous one that hurt. “You think you’ve been disappointing me?”
“I left,” she said, voice cracking. “I left Stonewick. I left Elira. I left the Academy locked. I left your father with his own curse and you with half-answers. You had to come back and fix everything I ran from.”
I opened my mouth to argue.
Memories rose up instead of her insisting we didn’t talk about Stonewick, of her steering conversations away from my magic, of her going quiet whenever my dad’s name came up. Of the way she’d looked at the Academy on her second return visit, an old wound.
“Mom,” I said, the word suddenly feeling too small for the person standing in front of me. “You didn’t leaveme.You were trying to protect yourself. And me. And it… wasn’t perfect. But you didn’t know better. I did the same for Celeste until I couldn’t.”
“I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me twice,” she repeated, like she needed to say it out loud to believe it.
I stepped forward before I could overthink it and wrapped my arms around her. For a second, she was rigid as the doorframe. Then she sagged into me, the lingering magic around her buzzing against my skin.
“Here’s a fun fact,” I said, voice muffled in her shoulder. “I am far more disappointed in cruise-ship guy than I will ever be in you. I never cared for my step-dad.”
“Hallelujah,” my dad muttered.
She snorted, half laugh, half sob.
My dad made a wounded noise. “Please do not remind me that my replacement is a man with a buffet card.”
“You were never replaced,” Mom and I said in unison, then looked at each other and laughed again, a little wildly.
Keegan watched us, something soft in his eyes, the storm in his shoulders easing. The tension that had been coiled in him since he’d found me on the mirror corridor floor finally, visibly, unwound a notch.
My mom pulled back, swiping under her eyes with the heel of her hand. The faint, unnatural glow was gone now, her gaze all her own again.
“I don’t know exactly what I did when the mirrors flared,” she admitted. “I felt the priestess pushing through and Elira trying to hold the line, and I… shoved. I anchored this cottage and you and whatever threads I could grab. It was mostly instinct and panic.”
My dad’s grin flashed, sudden and proud.
