Page 103 of The Magic We Made

“Hey,” she says, laying a hand on my arm. It’s bare because they made me take my clothes off and put on a hospital gown, even though I protested against this vehemently. There’s nothing less heroic than a hospital gown. “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“It’s hard to sleep when there’s an Italian feast going on next to you, and no one will let you have any.”

“The doctor just wants to make sure you’re okay.”

“I think when the patient is verbally able to assure the doctor that they are, in fact, okay, the doctor should take the patient’s word for it and let them have grapes and sausage.”

She laughs, then leans forward to push back some hair that I guess has fallen over my forehead. Her fingers feel light and cool against my skin. She smells of sunshine and her coconut shampoo.

“Do you want me to break you out of here?” she asks. “I can. I know Dr. Silver. I can get her to release you into my care.”

“There is nothing I have ever wanted more.”

Which is how, only a little more than an hour later, Mark and Dina are dropping us off in front of Frankie’s house. Lakeview Drive is dark. Even the DeLong boys have gone to bed, which makes sense since Frankie called them from the hospital to let them know we were okay, and found out they were still camped out in her living room with their grandmother, watching Daisy and the kittens.

Well, Grandma DeLong was watching Daisy and the kittens. All the little DeLongs had fallen fast asleep on Frankie’s couch. Mrs. DeLong was happy to wake them and give them the good news that we’re still alive, then march them all home to bed.

Now it’s close to five in the morning. The sun hasn’t even begun to lighten the dark sky in the east, but there’s no sign at the lake that anything unusual occurred the night before—except for the fact that all of my watercraft are currently lying at the bottom of the lake.

“You want help getting him to the door?” Mark asks Frankie as she jumps out of the back seat.

“I can walk,” I growl. Back at the hospital, they wouldn’t discharge me unless I agreed to be pushed to the exit by Frankie in a wheelchair. This didn’t turn out to be so bad. There are far worse things than being pushed in a wheelchair by a beautiful woman.

But I’m not about to let her brother babysit me.

“I’ve got him,” Frankie says, slipping an arm around my waist. “We’ll be okay. You two go home and go back to bed. I’m really sorry for all of this.”

“What are you sorry for?” Dina asks from the front passenger seat. “You’renot the one who tried to kidnap him.”

“Ha ha,” Frankie laughs nervously. “Okay, thanks, see you later.”

Mark and Dina drive away without bothering to ask a single question. No one—no one at all—has asked about Mother Nature or Hecate, or my personal relationship to either of them.

No one, it turns out, except Frankie. As soon as she gets inside the house, she turns on all the lights, checks to make sure Daisy has enough food and water and that the kittens are all right, then puts me to bed—where I was hoping she’d join me.

But instead, she stands at the end of it and looks down at me very seriously.

“Despite what Troy might think,” she says, “I don’t believe what I saw tonight was the result of anticholinergic poisoning.”

“No, it wasn’t.” It’s nice in Frankie’s bed. She has very high thread count sheets. They feel soft against my skin.

But not as soft as Frankie herself feels.

I pat the empty side of her bed and try to appear irresistibly adorable. “You look warm in that sweatshirt. Maybe you should take it off and join me here?”

“In a minute,” Frankie says, and begins to pace.

Uh-oh. Pacing is not a good sign.

“But if what I saw out there wasn’t a hallucination from anticholinergic poisoning,” she goes on, “what was it?”

“Magic.”

“Uh-huh.” Frankie stops pacing and turns to stare down at me, her hands on her hips. “Magic. Your explanation is magic.”

“Look, I know you don’t like it. I know it’s messy and not anything anyone, especially a therapist, wants to hear, but my family is magic, and there’s nothing I can do about that. We don’t get to choose our family. If we did, would you have chosen your sister Angie?”

Frankie holds up a single finger. “Don’t even start about Angie. She’s a hair stylist, not a... a... whatever your aunt Hecate is!”