“But I have to ask.” Maisie turns in her seat, facing her grandmother directly. “How are you so calm about this? Any of it?”
Gram’s hands adjust on the wheel.
A small shift, almost imperceptible, but I notice the way her knuckles tighten.
“You want the long version or the short one?”
“Either. Both.”
“The short version is that the world is stranger than most people let themselves believe, and I stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago.” Gram pauses. “The long version involves a stiff drink. Possibly several.”
Maisie waits.
Gram doesn’t continue.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it for now.”
Gram’s gaze flicks to the rearview mirror, meeting mine for a brief moment, before she pulls up to the front steps of Maisie’s home and kills the engine.
The morning stretches around us, warm and still.
The ridge looms in the distance, and somewhere beneath it, something waits.
“You’ve had a long night,” Gram says. “You both get some rest now. We’ll talk when it’s time to talk.”
And that’s that.
Chapter 18
From All Sides
Maisie
Gram’s taillights disappear around thebend, two red pinpricks swallowed by the dark morning.
The studio door sticks the way it always does when the humidity drops, and I have to throw my shoulder into it, the wood groaning beforeit gives.
Inside, the relief hits me like a key turning in a lock.
Gram knows. Gram approved.
My shoulders drop so fast I nearly sway, and something inside my chest finally unclenches.
I look at Oz, standing in the middle of my living room, and the first thought that surfaces is:I can have this now.
A laugh breaks out of me, bright and loose and exhausted. It bounces off the kitchen cabinets and the soap-stacked shelves and comes back sounding like someone else’s joy, someone who hasn’t been braced against the world for years.
The giddiness shifts, deepens, crashes headlong into hunger.
I close the distance and press my palm against his chest.
Violet and gold flare hot beneath my hand, rippling outward in a wave that matches the pulse hammering in my throat. I step into him, and his body swallows me, yieldingand dense, and I’m entirely done with careful.
Oz goes motionless.
Tendrils slide up my back through my shirt, warm and deliberate, chasing the knotted muscles he’s been memorizing for weeks. They trace the wrecked terrain of my shoulder blades, the seized-up ache in my lower back, the rigid column of my neck.
