And he still looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
I felt my patience fray.
“What does it mean?” I asked again, more sharply this time. “Because if you’re about to tell me that my family is somehow part of whatever keeps that woman alive, then you need to stop circling it and say it.”
The room stayed still around us.
Gideon lifted his eyes.
“In addition to the stone,” he said, and even now his voice was careful, “she needs tears of kin to reignite its ability. Fresh tears. It’s why she’s aged in recent years.”
I stared at him.
The words reached me one by one instead of all at once.
Stone.
Kin.
Tears.
Reignite.
Bella sat up straighter. “What?”
Keegan’s hand closed over the edge of the table. His grip wasn’t hard enough to splinter wood, but hard enough that I noticed.
Twobble looked appalled in a way that stripped all comedy out of him.
“That is,” he said faintly, “an absolutely unhinged sentence.”
No one contradicted him.
I kept looking at Gideon, because if I looked anywhere else, I thought I might lose the thread of myself entirely.
“Tears,” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“Actual tears.” I shook my head, thinking about my mother.
“Yes.”
“From family.” I was repeating more to myself than for confirmation.
His voice lowered. “Yes.”
I sat back slowly.
Something old and half-buried shifted in my memory then, not because I wanted it to, but because the words he’d said had reached down and tugged on something that had already been there.
A room.
A drawer.
My grandmother.
The image came back with sickening clarity.
