“I still have Cat and Dog,” I admit.
“You do? Oh, sweetheart. I remember that day. We had so much fun. That was the first day Parxon brought me into Cardiff.”
“Remember that day in the woods when you saw an airplane for the first time?”
He chuckles. “I do. He’d told me about them, but I didn’t believe him until I saw them for myself. Your father was always so adventurous.”
“That day, we heard voices. Who was that?”
“Serxon.” He gently brushes out a knot. “I think perhaps even then Serxon had the ring and was hoping to catch your father crossing, so he could learn the secrets. He’d followed us. Then he asked where I was, I guess, and your father told him that I’d returned home because of him. It was no secret that I did not like Serxon.”
Zuzu tells me the story of how my father’s brother stole the ring from their sire’s uncle and then killed him and made it look like he’d taken his boat out and drowned, the body never recovered.
“Once again, had Serxon waited, he would’ve eventually been passed that ring, in time. No patience.” As I sit there, I look around and see photos of Dad and Zuzu together, from very young, to even more recent ones.
Except in the most recent ones, my father’s grief weighs heavy on him. Deep lines furrow his brow, and sadness darkens his eyes, even though he still looks very young, as young as the last time I saw him.
“I need a picture of you, Zuzu. I can’t leave without pictures of you and Dad.”
“Of course, love.” He finishes brushing my hair and I curl up on the couch with him, my head in his lap, the way I used to do.
“Why don’t you take a nap?” he suggests.
I close my eyes, a wave of exhaustion washing through me. “Why were you in the woods this morning?”
He strokes my hair. “When your father is gone, I always go out to the stones. He has his ways of coping, and I have mine.” He sniffles. “And here is our angel.”
All those years I spent running. Had I known the truth, I would have gladly embraced and followed it.
I just hope my running hasn’t permanently run me out of Dex’s arms.
* * *
I dream.
I dream that I’m back behind the bar at Club Toxic, and hunky not-Ianto walks in. But instead of seeing me, he ignores me and dances with some pretty young twenty-one-year-old who’s out celebrating her birthday with her friends. He dances with her, sliding her already short dress up around her hips and his hand down the front of the strip of fabric masquerading as a thong.
I try to call out to him, to beg him to look at me, not to be with her, and then he bites her. She undulates in his arms and he dances her off the floor and down into the dungeon while I stand there being ignored by every vampire in the place.
My voice is silent. I can’t scream, I can’t—
“Eilidh.”
My eyes pop open, and I’m staring into the red-rimmed violet eyes of my father. He’s crying.
“Shh!” he reminds me in time for me to clap a hand over my mouth to muffle my happy scream.
“Daddy!”
I throw myself at him, and we both tumble onto the floor with Zuzu laughing from where he still sits on the couch. “I’ll be right back,” he says. “I need to use the toilet. She slept for nearly six hours, and I couldn’t bear to disturb her.”
Dad and I are both crying—god, I’ve literally cried more in the past day than I have in years—and if this is my new reality, then I’ll figure out a way to be okay with it.
I would miss Dexter like hell, but maybe I’m proof he can love again and move on from Robert. Maybe that was my brief purpose in his life.
It’ll take me a while to figure out what his was in mine when my heart hurts so bad from missing him.
Living the rest of my life confined to this house would still be a blessing.
