Page 112 of Truthfinder’s Promise

“I was stressed out. If I didn’t have Natalie, who would? Grams had already said she wouldn’t do it. Then I felt guilty because part of me wanted it to happen. I felt like I was in over my head and having the decision made for me might be a relief.

“So when Nat started telling me how she really had made the wind move I went off on her. I told her she needed to grow up. She cried. It’s not like I hadn’t seen her cry before. But it was the first time she’d done it because I was a complete asshole to her. She just quietly told me it really had happened and then went to her room. She never talked about it again.”

“Your grandmother’s very smart,” Meredith said. “She handled the situation in a way guaranteed to get you to act exactly like you did. So you would hurt Natalie, so she wouldn’t bring it up again. So she wouldn’t do it again. It wasn’t your fault.”

He’d like to believe that. “If I’d listened to her, if she’d felt like she could talk to me, maybe none of this would have happened.”

“If Rebekah had been honest with either of you, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. How do you think Julian found her in the first place?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, I do. Her father’s an Aspecter. He must have talked about his affair with a Shifter at some point, and that story got back to Julian, who tracked him down. Nat’s father knew your mother was pregnant when she left him. So Julian realized all he had to do to find a Shifter, was find the daughter.

“Aspecters can track a person by blood if that person doesn’t know how to Shield against it. And Julian had Natalie’s father’s to Track her by. You couldn’t have stopped this.”

Meredith wanted to wrap her arms around Jensen. To kiss away the pain on his face until he stopped blaming himself for things that were out of his control. But she didn’t know if he would want her to.

“She’ll need to be trained,” she made herself say. “She must have found subconscious outlets for her Aspect, or it would have built up and exploded out of her in spectacular fashion. But she deserves to know that half of herself. To be able to control it.”

“I’ll take care of it.” He gathered himself. She watched him do it, watched him pack up the hurt and the grief and the doubt and shove it down so he could keep going. Because that’s what you did when people were counting on you and you felt like you didn’t have anyone to help you through it. He was used to doing everything on his own.

He ran his hand over the tattoo on his wrist. “Guess we have a marriage to dissolve,” he said abruptly.

“Yeah.” She had more to say, but it could wait until this was done. She held out her hand and he took it. “What do we do?”

But even as she asked she felt the tug of magic, and watched as the tattoos faded.

“We both agreed,” he said, “so it’s done.”

So simple. It’s done. Did he mean the marriage, or them?

She ran her hand over the bare expanse of her skin. “I have something I need to say.”

“It’s okay.” His face took on a carefully neutral expression. “You don’t have to explain. I get it.”

“You get what, exactly?”

“That this is more than you bargained for. I come with a teenager. She’s got two years until she can live on her own, and I’m not going to kick her to the curb the second she turns eighteen. And if Rebekah has her way, I’ll be running the enclave some day. You’ve gotten an up front taste of what being in the middle of our politics is like.

“It’s a lot to put on a person. We barely know each other. You don’t have to explain to me how it was fun while it lasted, but it was the emotion of the moment or whatever, and how it’s not me, it’s you. It’s me. It’s fine.”

She couldn’t decide whether to smile, because she was pretty sure he wanted her to stay, or throttle him for having already decided she was leaving. She kept her tone light. “How nice of you to lay my words out for me so I don’t even have to say them.”

He looked at her sharply. “I was trying to spare us both the guilt and regret and drama. Haven’t we been through enough in the last week without it?”

“I see. And by your logic, am I supposed to thank you for putting it all so succinctly and drive you back home in silence, where we will amicably part without any drama?”

“What do you want? Do you want to yell at me?” He stood, facing her and opening his arms wide in invitation. “Fine. If it’s what you need, get it out. What did you want to say?”

“I love you.”

His hands dropped to his sides. “Come again?”

“I love you. That’s what I was going to say before your little speech. I was then going to follow it with how I know Natalie is very important to you, and I don’t have any qualifications to recommend me as a parental figure, but she is going to need someone with Aspect to look to for advice and I was hoping you might trust me enough for that person to be me.

“If you were on board with what I was saying by that point, I was going to ask to discuss living arrangements. However, since apparently what I want is to break up with you without any drama, I suppose we can just go get that silent car ride started.”

Jensen looked stunned. She stood and turned for the door. She’d taken five steps toward it when she started to worry he was actually going to let her walk through it. Maybe she had read the room wrong. Maybe what he did want was a drama-less end to their non-relationship. Maybe—