Page 5 of The Neighborly Thing To Do
But none of that matters to her. I genuinely can’t tell if she thinks she’s doing a good thing, or if she saw an opportunity to get a nanny desperate enough to work for shit terms and took advantage of it. Either way, I don’t want it.
I’m not going to live in their spare bedroom and be grateful for it. I want my own fucking house, the one I’ve maintained for a decade now. The mural of flowers on the living room wall was painted by me. All the plants outside were lovingly maintained by me. Georgia’s little height chart penciled in on the back of the bathroom door was kept up by me. Even the damned scorch mark on the counter from when I dropped a too-hot sheet pan was made by me. That’s my space. I don’t want her spare room or her fake charity.
But I’m at work, and I need to keep my mouth shut. Losing my job at this point would be the final nail in the coffin of staying in town.
“Cash or credit?” I ask her as blandly as I can.
She snaps her fingers and the card appears in her hand. Show-off. G can do the same trick, but it’s endearing when she does it, mostly because she likes to magic up things I inadvertently lose. This is rubbing in my face that Caroline belongs here and I don’t.
“Think about it, sweetie, but I’ll need an answer by the end of the week.”
Yeah, fat chance. I run her card and hand over her receipt, watching her take her groceries and leave.
I’ve never felt fully welcomed in this town, but it’s never been worse than it is today. I lived here until I was eighteen months old, and I raised a whole kid here. I’ve lived here for ten years straight, paid my taxes, baked things for the school bake sale, and even ran a Girl Scout troop for one year that doesn’t bear remembering. But even so, it’s like none of it ever mattered. I’m the human, and that’s it.
Honestly, I don’t know if my father was disappointed or relieved that I turned out to be human. It’s not like he was ever in love with my mother, a one night stand who happened to get pregnant. He’d married her because that’s what you do when you might have accidentally knocked up an unsuspecting human with a shifter baby, and he’d brought us both here.
When I hit eighteen months and had shown absolutely no signs of a shifter side, he and my mom quietly divorced, and he was probably thrilled not to have to keep us. She’d moved all the way back to the west coast, and my dad had been present in mylife via child support and twice yearly visits, but never back in his home town.
He hadn’t been a terrible father. I’d had friends with truly shitty absentee dads, but mine had never missed a child support payment. There was no legal agreement between my parents, but he paid anyway. When I’d wanted to go to college, he’d coughed up even more money. It hadn’t been enough to completely offset the tuition, but it had been a damn good start.
Of course, I’d made it a semester and a half, and then he’d died along with his wife, and then I was back in town for the first time in almost two decades with a heartbroken little sister I’d never met before.
I doubt he ever thought I’d be back here, but then again, I also doubt he thought he’d die before his little girl, the daughter he actually wanted, even hit double digits.
I close my eyes for a minute, taking advantage of the lull in customers. All of today has been rough. Talking to G had been a balm for my soul, but I can’t burden her with my stuff. She’s supposed to be starting a life, spreading her literal and metaphorical wings and learning to fly. Calling my mother was painful. None of the townsfolk who stopped by to talk were even remotely helpful, with the possible exception of Finn, who at least asked if I was okay. But he’s a man of few words, and we usually only talk when I ask if I can pick from the blackberry bushes that straddle our property line or we discuss shared fall clean up of our yards or when his mother forces him to deliverChristmas cookies to me, so I’m not exactly expecting great comfort from him.
What I really want, I realize with a dawning sense of loneliness, is to talk to my dad. Not that he and I ever had many serious conversations—hard to, when I only saw him a couple times a year—but I want one now. I’m a goddamn adult, and I want us to have the conversation. About G and this town and my mother and why I’m the way I am and all the rest of it. I know I was an obligation and not the child he dreamed of, but I want to talk to him anyway. I want someone to reassure me that I belong here. I have no idea what he’d say, if it’d be comforting or more upsetting, but I need to hear it.
But he’s gone, and I’m here, and customers are piling up again, so I straighten my shoulders and desperately, fruitlessly, search for a plan.
Chapter 4
Finn
Ihate this. I hate the look on her face, the way her eyes were all empty and dead. I hate the idea of Hearthstone as the type of place that would throw her out. But most of all, I hate that she evidently thinks I’m like that, too.
Well, when have I given her reason to think otherwise? When was the last time I spoke to Cassidy, anyway? And I mean really spoke to her, something beyond the stilted, single-sentence exchange of neighbors. We talk about yardwork sometimes, and she asks before she picks the blackberries on my side of the property line. Other than those practically business-like conversations, the only other real interaction we had was almost a decade ago.
She hadn’t been here that long. She’d been so young, frazzled and overwhelmed by everything happening. I couldn’t blame her; I’m ten or so years her senior, and I definitely didn’tconsider myself ready for kids at that time. And her kid could turn into an owl and perch up a tree when she was being stubborn, which I imagine compounded the stress.
Georgia had been eight or nine, probably grieving her parents and acting out, and she’d shifted into her owl form and gone up one of the trees in the yard and refused every one of her sister’s requests to come down. Cassidy had tried climbing the tree, but there were no good branches for that. I’d seen it play out from my window and gone out when I realized how close to tears Cassidy was. I had wings, and while the little girl could out-maneuver me any day of the week, I’d been doing this a lot longer than her. I’d caught her and brought her back down to her sister.
Cassidy had thanked me profusely, not quite able to stop the tears, hugging the now-human child like she was worried she’d never see her again. And I, being the idiot about compliments my mother always accused me of being, had grunted and gone back inside, and that had been the end of that.
The thing about Cassidy is she isgood. She loves that little girl—who isn’t so little anymore, she’s off at fucking magic college now—and I know she’d fight to the ends of the Earth for her. She makes her own blackberry jam, and she sings when she prunes her garden. I’ve seen her help old Mrs. Lasser, who got potion ingredients in her eye twenty years ago and now can’t see so well, read labels on food products to make sure she getsthe right one. My mother thinks she’s the sweetest thing. She’s good, and this town will be worse without her.
So no, I’m not giving her boxes, not unless she tells me she truly wants to leave.
There has to be a way to keep her in town. I debate flying over to the mayor’s house and threatening him on her behalf. I know what I look like. I’m big and broad, with horns that freak people out and sharp teeth. And the wings. For some reason, people are so scared of giant wings. But it’s hard to physically attack a ghost, so I set that plan as a last resort.
Hearthstone isn’t known for its human population, that’s true, but surely Cassidy can’t be the first. There’s no way that, in the three hundred and twelve years this town has been around, we’ve never had another human living here. I wrack my brains, trying to remember—
Cassidy’s mother. That’s the only other example I can think of. It’d been a long time ago now. I’d been a kid myself. But Derek Wright had bought the house next door when my cousins left town for sunnier weather, and he’d moved in with his then-wife. She’d been pregnant, and eventually there’d been a little baby. Cassidy. And she’d left, yes, but for a while, shehadbeen here.
Because she’d been married to Cassidy’s father.
It’s like a bolt of lightning hit me. Yes, that’s it. That’s the answer.
