“I’m serious, Clara,” he insists. “I heard about it happening just this week.”
“Well I haven’t,” Mama counters.
Dad shrugs and wanders off. Devlin smiles at me before meandering to help.
I find Addison fidgeting with the table settings. “Feylin’s barbecuing?”
She laughs. “He’s very hands-on for a king.”
“And for a fae.”
My sister grins. “I can’t say you’re wrong. Here. Help me inside. I’ve got some salads to put together. We wanted to do this ourselves, so we gave the servants the night off.”
She takes my hand and pulls me into the kitchen. Everyone else stays outside, enjoying the warm air. It is a nice change from the cold. My sisters seem to be especially enjoying it as they fight over the hammocks while my mother spends time with Ryals, who’s become her adopted grandson. It’s very sweet.
Addison shows me a bowl of tomatoes and asks me to cut them in half while she slices a roll of mozzarella.
“So, Devlin,” she remarks, brow curled.
“Oh, as if you have any room to comment. You’re the one who made me take him the books that Nana ordered. And just so you know, I’m not happy that you knew about her existence and didn’t tell us.”
She flashes me a sweet smile. Addison is a good, kind person, the sort of person that it’s impossible not to love.
“Nana made me promise not to tell.”
I grab a celery stick and chew it loudly. “So you say.”
“But Devlin?”
I finish eating the celery and pick up a tomato. “I don’t know what the big deal is. So I brought him. I’ve been helping him with an invention.”
“You have?”
“Why do you sound so happy?”
She scoffs and layers cut circles of cheese in a glass platter. “Because you love working with magic. You used to be so great at potions before you…” She wrinkles her nose. “What did happen, there?”
“She went to work for your mother, and she didn’t have time to do it anymore,” Nana tells her.
Where did she come from? The wall. She literally slipped through the wall to interrupt this private conversation with my sister.
Addison frowns. She’s so pretty, even when she frowns. She’s got auburn hair, brown eyes, skin that will fry if it even sees a peek of sunshine, and she’s got just the sweetest personality. Before Feylin met her, he was a big old grump. I’d never spent any time with him, but all you had to do was look at the man to know that he was grouchy inside and out.
But now he’s a big old teddy bear. Her teddy bear.
“But you don’t have to be at the bookstore as much as you used to. I’m there now. In fact, you could pursue potions or something else if you wanted.” She sighs. “I know that for a long time you were obligated to work at the shop, to make it your life. But it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.”
“Yes, Blair,” Nana adds, eying the mozzarella like she’s about to steal one, “the world’s your oyster. What used to be true isn’t, and what isn’t true, is.”
“What does that mean?”
She scowls at me and I wink. “I get it. You’re talking about Devlin.”
My grandmother lifts her transparent hands. “Now why would I ever be talking about him?”
“Would you quit? You’ve been trying to get us together ever since you came back.”
She smooths a hand over her hair. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
