Chapter 3
Cassidy
“Oh, sweetie, I just heard.”
I fight to keep my face neutral as I scan through Caroline Summers’ groceries.
Everyone in town seems to have just heard.
Even Finn Delaney heard, and that man is downright anti-social most of the time.
He lives above a workshop surrounded by tombstones, a pretty clear signal for “don’t talk to me,” but he already knew my gossip before showing up today.
“Yes,” I say, which isn’t an answer and I’m hoping it will be a discouragement to continue this line of conversation.
No such luck, unfortunately. “So I spoke with Grady after I heard, and we agree, we think we can do something for you—”
“Oh?” I don’t get my hopes up. Nothing comes for free, and Caroline hasn’t ever looked out for me before, but she is an attorney, so maybe she knows something I don’t.
“We’ve been talking about hiring a nanny for the boys. It’d be a live-in position, so you’d stay in town. We’d provide room and board, and you’d just have to work the nights with them, while Grady is at work and I’m asleep. We all know how good with children you are.”
I purse my lips. I am good with precisely one child, and that’s because I had to be. I’d never even babysat before Dad died and Georgia was left to me, and Caroline’s two kids are younger than Georgia was when I met her.
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 my life 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 deliver Christmas 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.