She could almost see it in the way his eyes lit up when he mentioned his parents, the way his voice softened when he asked about her sisters.
“My mother was furious,” she concluded.
“It sounds like she’s hard on you.”
“She has high standards. And my older sister effortlessly meets them. So it tends to be a bone of contention that I don’t or can’t.”
“You have a younger sister too, right?”
“Yes. Shelly isn’t like me or Juna. She’s kind of obsessed with the surface. She was very upset that she didn’t get to be the one to come here with you.”
“What is in her future? Juna is meant for the throne, I assume.”
“Yeah. Actually, I don’t know. I don’t know if my mother knows yet, honestly. She’s still pretty young. She’s definitely in her ‘defiance, then moping when she doesn’t get her way’ phase.”
“That makes sense.”
“Did you ever have one?”
“One what?”
“Defiance phase.”
“Oh, no.”
“Of course not,” Iris mumbled under her breath, disappointed that she couldn’t at least imagine that a much younger Finn had been a human being with thoughts, desires, and dreams.
“My father was killed just around the time when I would have been heading into that phase of my life,” Finn said. “Then, well, it felt wrong to misbehave in any way. My mother was already going through so much.”
“You were too,” Iris said, just barely resisting the urge to reach out and put her hand over his.
“It wasn’t the same.”
“How so?”
“She was trying to fight the city to get them to take accountability for their part in what happened.”
“A lack of security, right?”
“Yes. There should have been paranormal security guards at the very least. But she was fighting for wards in the courthouse, so it would be impossible for anything like that to happen again, no matter how sensitive the cases they were working on were.”
“Did she accomplish that?”
“She didn’t live to see it implemented, but she definitely got the ball rolling. It became a law about a year after she passed away.”
“How old were you when you lost her?”
“Two weeks shy of my eighteenth birthday. We’d spent the night before packing all my belongings to head off to college.”
“You were the one to find her?” Iris asked, this time reaching out and giving in to the urge to put her hand over his.
“Yes. It seemed … peaceful. I hadn’t even known she was sick. Her attorney said she’d known but hadn’t wanted to worry me.”
“But knowing would have given you time to prepare.”
“I don’t know if anything could have prepared me for losing both of them so young.”
“Should I not have brought it up?” she asked, noting the tension in his body.
