Page 63 of The Magic We Made

“Wow,” he says with a grin, running a finger along the curve of my right breast. “So this is what it’s like to sleep with a shrink. So many questions!”

“I’m sorry. Asking questions about people ismysuperpower. Does it bother you?”

He grins some more. “No, I like it. But where is this going? Areyou thinking about getting a tattoo of our names entwined in a heart? I had no idea how possessive you are. But, hey, I like it. I’ll get one, too, if it will make you happy.”

I laugh again. “No, that’s not why I’m asking. I just wondered. You lost your dad at a young age, like I did. That’s got to have made you feel different, too. It did me.”

“Yeah, well, you come from a normal family—”

I can’t help snorting at this. No one who knows my family would ever call it normal... except someone like Ash, whose family appears to be even more dysfunctional.

“Youdo,” he insists. “Do you know what I’d have given to have a family like yours instead of the one I got?”

“Why? What was wrong with your family? I mean, besides having Derrick Winters as your absurdly young uncle.”

“Yeah, right. There was that, just for starters. Then my dad was a drunk—”

“Oh, Ash. I’m so sorry.”

He shrugs. “It wasn’t a big deal. The worst he did was hit me, and that—”

“Ash!”

“What?” Ash looks startled by my reaction. “Oh my God, don’t look like that. I told you it wasn’t that bad. I was a lot to handle as a kid. I definitely deserved to get smacked around every now and then.”

“Ash, you’re minimizing, which is very common in survivors of abuse. I know you know that no child deserves to be beaten, no matter what they’ve done.”

“I wouldn’t call itbeating. It was just a smack every now and then if I didn’t duck fast enough. And look at me. I turned out all right.”

“Yes, you did,” I say carefully. “Children are very resilient. But, Ash... what your dad did was still abuse.”

“Yeah, I know. But he traveled a lot, so I didn’t have to see too much of him. My mom was what they call codependent—you’ve probably heard of that.”

“I have.”

“Yeah. So she was in denial for a while that any of it was really happening. She’s better now. Buthermom—my grandmother—really helped. She’s the one who convinced my parents to send me to boarding school when I was seven—”

“Ash.” My heart twists. My niece Portia is seven. She only just had her first sleepover, and that was at her cousin’s house. “That’sreallyyoung.”

“Maybe. But it was way better than being at home.”

I bet it was. “I’m so sorry,” I repeat. “That had to be tough.”

“It was fine,” he insists. “I spent most of my holidays with friends or my grandmother.”

Thank goodness for her, I think, softly stroking his dark hair. Recent studies have shown that having just one caring adult in a child’s life can help them cope and even thrive in a dysfunctional environment.

“How did your dad die?” I ask gently.

“He got struck by lightning.”

My fingers freeze. “What?”

“Yeah, can you believe that?” Ash chuckles. “On the seventeenth hole at the Biltmore in Phoenix, of all places.”

“Phoenix, Arizona?” I stare at him. “He got struck by lightning in thedesert?”

“I know! There wasn’t even a cloud in the sky. A giant bolt of lightning came from out of nowhere, andboom!”