Chapter 23
Miles’s parents were waiting for him when he got home.
He was expecting it—he’d have to be stupid not to. Not only had he and Charlee missed dinner and several calls, but they didn’t even have a believable excuse ready. Miles had just sent them a vague “I’m alive, be home soon” text and started praying to any higher power willing to take pity on him.
“Come in here, please,” his dad called, leaning out of the office doorway. His expression was unreadable.
As Miles crept towards the office and saw his mom sitting at her desk too, he knew he was screwed.
Charlee tried to follow him in, her squared shoulders and scowl suggesting she was ready for battle, but Adam stopped her with a touch on the shoulder.
“Go on upstairs,” he urged gently. “We’ll come talk to you later. ”
A pang of guilt went through Miles—Charlee had no problem being his accomplice, but he’d never wanted to drag her down with him.
Her chin jutted up. She could refuse if she wanted. Adam wasn’t her dad, and she was an adult. But after a tense moment, she nodded and strode away, shooting Miles an apologetic glance.
The office was messier than usual—always a sign that his dad was picking up extra jobs—with tall stacks of books and papers on the dining table and supplies spilling out of his desk drawers. It smelled like coffee, ink, and herbs.
Adam pulled out a seat for Miles from the table, then scooted his desk chair over to sit with Sarah. Two against one. Never great odds.
His mom didn’t say anything. His dad sighed, running a hand down his face with a rasp of callused skin on stubble. “We know you were at the Hawthorne manor.”
Miles’s stomach bottomed out. After what his mom had said in the kitchen, he’d assumed she suspected he was still seeing Gabriel. It was pointless to deny it now; he could see in their faces that they knew.
“How?” he managed to croak out.
“We had a hunch… then we checked your phone location to be sure.”
Ah. It probably would’ve been smart to turn that off. His whole family location was shared on their phones in case a job went bad. Miles had enabled the feature forever ago and promptly forgot all about it.
He’d never been cut out for all this sneaking around and lying. It was always destined to end with him making a stupid, amateur mistake.
The jig was up. Miles had no idea what came next. The grounding of a lifetime? Locks on his bedroom door and windows? Twenty-four-seven surveillance?
His mom leaned forward, her desk chair squeaking, and Miles braced himself.
“I realized I wasn’t fair earlier,” she said softly.
Too softly. Were his parents doing a good-cop, bad-cop routine?
“I expected you to be honest with me when I haven’t done the same.
As your parent, it’s my job to lead by example. ”
Adam put his hand on Sarah’s knee. “And I can forget to be a dad. In this line of work, the hours, the things I deal with… it takes over. I haven’t been here for you as much as I should be, and I’m sorry.”
This was so much worse than if they were just angry.
“No, it’s not—” Miles tried.
“We should’ve talked to you weeks ago,” his dad interrupted. “Before we took you to the Hawthorne party. Or when you asked for answers. We were… selfish. Our history with the Hawthornes, with Felicity, is something that neither of us like to revisit.”
Unexpected indignation rose in Miles’s throat. He’d been suffering, second-guessing himself and worrying that he’d never be able to repair what he’d broken, wondering if they’d ever forgive him. All because it hadn’t occurred to them to put aside their discomfort.
Sarah must’ve sensed it. “We want to tell you the truth. And we want to understand what’s going on between you and that boy.”
“His name is Gabriel,” Miles bit out. “And I already tried to explain, but you punished me for it.”
Regret shone in her blue eyes. “You don’t owe us—me—a second chance, but we’re asking for one.”
He wanted to be furious, stubborn, to make her understand how it stung to have her pleas ignored, to not feel worthy of an explanation. They’d hidden so much from him, treated him like a traitor to their family.
More than that, Miles wanted to tell them everything— unload it all, get a warm hug, hear them say they were proud of him for doing what was right.
It was so much easier living in other people’s emotions than trying to untangle his own.
He stared at the framed family tree, tracing the branching lines and willing the hurt to fade. “What happened with Felicity?”
He needed to know her story, find out if she was truly capable of hurting her own son.
His parents exchanged a lingering look. Adam spoke up first. “We were friends when we were younger, after we met at one of the Hawthorne parties. Neither of us wanted to be there, and we ended up stealing chocolate cake from the kitchen and getting my skateboard out of the car so I could teach her how to ride it in the driveway.” His smile was small, but tender with the memory.
“She was… different back then. Shy, and a bit socially awkward, but whip-smart and curious. We were friends for months.”
This was the first Miles had ever heard of Felicity where she sounded human. It was like holding two pieces from completely different puzzles in your hand and trying to find a way to make them fit together. The magic had altered her so completely.
“Then I met your mom,” his dad continued, taking her hand.
Miles had heard the story before—Adam tagged along on an emergency haunting call with Grandpa Henry and met her there.
Apparently, he’d heroically saved her from a falling wardrobe.
“We didn’t start dating until later, but we became fast friends, so I introduced her to Felicity. They were…”
“Inseparable,” Sarah finished in a whisper. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “The day we met, I found my best friend. Your dad had Robin growing up, but I was an only child. All I ever wanted was a sister. Felicity… I thought she was that, for a while.”
She’d never spoken about Felicity without hatred in her voice. Hearing the pain, the regret, was worse.
“Felicity’s home life wasn’t easy, anyone could see that.
But something changed. We met one night, and she showed up with a suitcase, begging me to run away with her.
” Her voice caught, snagged in a trap of memories.
“She was scared. She said I didn’t understand the pressure her parents were putting on her, the expectations.
That she couldn’t do it and she had to get out of Thistle, leave her family. ”
It wasn’t hard to see where this story went. “You said no.”
“I couldn’t up and leave everything like that. I was graduating in a few months. All my family was here. And she wanted to cut out all the psychic stuff, which meant Adam.”
“We’d started dating a few weeks before,” his dad added, tugging at his cuffs to straighten his faded flannel. “We didn’t realize how upset she was about it. We’d made her feel unimportant and left out.”
Sarah’s arms settled around her middle, holding herself upright.
Teetering on a precipice Miles couldn’t see.
“She wouldn’t explain anything to me. I told her she was being irrational, that her fight with her parents would blow over.
I said no, but that Adam and I would meet her the next day and help her figure everything out.
I was going to talk to my parents about letting her stay with us for a while. ”
Miles could picture it all too well. If Gabriel had asked him to run away, to uproot his whole life and leave everything behind, his answer probably would’ve been the same.
“We were supposed to meet her the next day, but she never showed.” There was an undercurrent of sorrow in his dad’s voice. “Weeks went by before we saw her again. She never answered any of our calls or met us in our usual spots. When we did see her…”
“She wasn’t the girl we knew. The coldness in her eyes, the way she spoke to me and the things she said…
” Sarah shook her head. There was a distant noise from the hallway; Miles wondered if Charlee was listening in.
“When she stopped seeing us, I knew she was angry, thinking I’d picked Adam over her.
She threw away our whole friendship without another word.
She cut us out like we meant nothing to her. ”
Since meeting Marjorie and feeling the difference in the darkness around her compared to Gabriel and Edmund, Miles had wondered if there was a point where something changed.
A certain amount of time that had to pass before the magic fully settled, or a specific trigger.
Felicity’s story all but confirmed that theory.
That had to mean it wasn’t too late for Gabriel or his brothers. The corruption would leave once the curse was broken—as long as it hadn’t changed him yet.
Miles’s relief was snuffed out by a horrible realization: his parents didn’t know about the grimoire or the curse. They had no idea that Felicity had been transformed against her will.
It still hurt; Miles could hear it in his mom’s voice. The lack of closure was a heavy burden she’d been carrying all these years.
Would it heal them to know their friend hadn’t willingly turned on them, or hurt them worse to know what she’d gone through? What they might’ve been able to save her from?
The rain started outside, tentative plinks that turned into thunder against the street outside. Sarah’s gaze drifted to the window as the wind blew a gust to batter the glass. Demanding to be let inside.
“Our family passed down warnings about the Hawthornes,” his dad admitted. “We just thought Felicity was different. And we were wrong.”
Miles’s entire body went cold. Was this his future with Gabriel if they failed? To look into his eyes one day and see an unrecognizable person? For Gabriel to have everything that made him him erased?
The clock on the wall ticked ominously over his head.
“You weren’t wrong,” Miles declared. He’d made his decision. His parents deserved to know the truth. “There’s something evil, a curse on the Hawthornes, and it infects them with a darkness. It changes them.”
He explained everything that he could. His premonition and running into Gabriel at the Hawthorne party.
Jocelyn reaching out through the visions to save Gabriel, putting the pieces together about the grimoire and the curse, unraveling their families’ history.
And if he made it sound like they’d averted Gabriel’s death by banishing Florence, conveniently forgetting to mention that he might be on the chopping block now, it was only so he didn’t get locked away for safekeeping, called an idiot for actively pursuing a killer, or give his parents a heart attack.
“We’re trying to break the spell that Florence cast,” he finished tiredly. “And save Gabriel’s family.”
Sarah, who’d gotten progressively paler and more visibly distressed as the story went on, sniffled. She had a white-knuckled grip on Adam’s hand. “She was trying to leave. She knew it was coming and she begged me for help. I should’ve listened to her.”
“You didn’t know,” Adam soothed, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and kissing the top of her head. “Neither of us did.”
Miles felt like he was intruding on a private moment, but he needed to finish. “What happened to Felicity… I’m not going to let it happen to Gabriel. Or his brothers. I promised him.”
“He’s lucky to have you in his corner.” Adam leaned forward and clasped Miles on the shoulder, giving a firm squeeze. “He couldn’t ask for anyone better.”
His mom crossed the room to pull Miles into a hug, not much taller than him even when he was sitting. He could feel her quiver against him. It was too tight, her hair itching his nose, but he couldn’t pull away.
She didn’t have to speak.
“You and Felicity. Jocelyn and Rosalie. Me and Gabriel…” he said once they’d pulled away, everyone in the room acting like they weren’t wiping tears away. “Our families keep finding ways to each other. What if the universe keeps bringing us together for a reason?”
“To break their curse?” Adam offered.
No. It was more than that, more than playing a role in someone else’s story.
“Rosalie never moved past losing Jocelyn. You couldn’t help Felicity.
And now, Gabriel is facing a lifetime of having dark magic inside him if I don’t change the future.
Maybe our family is doomed to be continuously given chances to save someone we care about and failing.
” Miles struggled to speak around the sudden lump in his throat.
“Maybe this is about breaking our curse too.”
Sarah blinked a few times. Her fingers combed through his hair, slipping down to cup his cheek. “I think you’re right.”