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“What?” I wasn’t following.

“When I came out. Before—” He stopped, swallowed. “She asked about you. How you were.”

“What did you say?” It wasn’t what I wanted to ask him. I wanted to know why he’d come out here. What he’d hoped to gain from agreeing to see her again. From coming back to this hell-hole of a house. I didn’t know how to ask any of that without sounding like a complete asshole.

“I told her you were happy,” he replied, sounding a little weepy. “She cried.”

I wanted to ask him if he’d told her I was happy living with a man. An Indigenous badger shifter who didn’t believe in their God or his restrictions. Who made me happy because he never asked me to deny myself food or sex, who loved me exactly as I was. But I didn’t, because I knew Noah hadn’t said any of that. And I was pretty sure our mother wouldn’t have liked hearing it if he had.

“Did she ask if you were?” I wanted to know.

“Y-yeah,” he managed, then sniffled. “I-I don’t think she understood,” he continued, answering my next set of questions even though I hadn’t asked them out loud. “And she wouldn’t use my name, but she wasn’t mean. She just…” He trailed off.

I knew what he’d been about to say.She just kept pretending that Noah was her daughter and just happened to have short hair and was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. As though it wasn’t perfectly obvious that Noah’s body didn’t look hardly at all like he’d looked at fifteen.

Maybe he could forgive her for that, but I couldn’t.

There was a lot I couldn’t forgive her for, even if I didn’t think she deserved to die.

But I didn’t say any of that.

I rested my cheek on the top of Noah’s head. “I know,” is all I said out loud.

“Do you think that—that maybe…?” He trailed off again, but I knew what he was asking.Would she ever have accepted us for who we are? Loved us for who we are?I was pretty sure I knew the answer, and it wasn’t the one he wanted to hear.

But I couldn’t lie to him. “I couldn’t say,” I said, instead.

I don’t know if he took it at face value or understood what I didn’t say, but he fell silent, still leaning against my shoulder, my cheek still on his hair.

“Love you, Sethy,” he said, finally.

“Love you, too, Nono.”

“Are you okay?”Elliot asked me as he closed the door to our hotel room.

“Mrrrp?”

I looked down at the cat, who had walked up to me, her little brown head tilted back and her tail undulating faintly back and forth. “You, too, huh?” I asked her.

“Seth.”

I sighed as I sat down on the end of the bed, having navigated around Sassafras. “I’m fine,” I replied.

“Are you?” he asked me, coming over and kneeling at my feet to unlace first one shoe, and then the other while he waited for my answer.

“If you’re asking if I’m emotionally devastated by my mother’s death and hiding it, no, I’m not. If you’re asking if I have long-term emotional scarring from my fucked-up childhood, yes, of course I do. Either way, I’m not about to break down into a weeping mess about it.” I was irritable, cranky from pain and exhaustion and stress. “Am I going to probably have nightmares about this whole shitty mess? Also yes. But it’ll be fine.”

“And if I’m asking how much pain you’re in and whether or not you need meds and some ice cream?” His voice was gentle.

I deflated, the anger stripped away.

“Yes, please,” I said meekly.

Elliot stood back up, then bent and kissed my sweaty forehead. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Feed Sassafras first?” I asked, not wanting to get back up to do it.

He did, scooping dry food into her bowl, which she immediately began crunching between tiny, sharp teeth.