CHAPTER 102 LYRA
LYRA
You’re sure you want to part with this piece?” The jeweler looked from the black opal ring to Lyra. “It’s quite remarkable.”
Lyra snuck the briefest of looks at Grayson, who arched a brow. In other words: Put your money where your mouth is, sweetheart.
He’d come back to her. Now it was Lyra’s turn to hold up her end of the deal.
“I’m sure,” she told the jeweler, who had to be eighty if he was a day. He was the kind of jeweler who required appointments, the kind who dealt only in one-of-a-kind pieces.
The kind to quote an absolutely eye-watering number at them without so much as batting an eye.
Lyra stared at the jeweler for a moment, then shot Grayson a disgruntled look. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“I am universally known for my comedic timing,” Grayson replied in a deadpan. Pay up, his eyes said. Or rather, allow the gentleman to pay you. But there was something else in Grayson’s eyes, too, something about the exact set of his lips that felt to Lyra like the throwing of a gauntlet.
It was that not-quite-smile that had Lyra turning back to the jeweler.
“Is that really the best you can do?” Somehow, Lyra managed to ask that with a straight face, like she bartered over precious jewels all the time, like there was nothing particularly remarkable about an establishment where every piece of jewelry was a work of art, a place where the quality of the ultra-precious gemstones was matched only by their number and size.
“Perhaps there’s something else you have your eye on?” the jeweler asked. “A trade I might throw in to sweeten the deal?”
“What do you have,” Grayson asked, “that is simple and small?”
“Subtle,” the jeweler interpreted.
“Durable,” Grayson countered. “Suitable for everyday wear. But the more vivid, the better.”
“Not the type of piece I typically traffic in,” the jeweler said.
“However…” He turned on the stool he sat on and when he turned back, he had small box in his hand.
“My granddaughter found this at a flea market. A diamond in the rough—sans the diamond. I bought it off her to reward her entrepreneurial spirit… and her eye.”
He opened the box, and a necklace stared back at Lyra. “Neon apatite,” the jeweler said. “Raw and uncut, but there’s something compelling about the shape and the brightness of it, is there not?”
The vivid blue stone was small but subtle wasn’t a word that Lyra would have used to describe it. It hung from a simple gold chain, far more delicate than the stone itself.
“How old is your granddaughter?” Lyra asked.
The jeweler smiled. “Seven. It’s not worth much, I’m afraid.”
“It’s perfect,” Grayson replied. “Or rather, it will be once you revise your initial offer upward by about seventy percent.”
Before the jeweler could reply, the third person who’d accompanied Grayson and Lyra to this meeting weighed in.
“Eighty percent,” Nan harrumphed. Despite the number of times the ring had passed hands unofficially, her signature was still needed for the sale.
“And,” she told the jeweler sternly, “I will allow you to take me to dinner.”
After what had happened at Vantage, Nan hadn’t asked a single question. Whatever had happened, she didn’t want to know.
The aging jeweler Nan had just propositioned blinked. “Pardon me?” he said.
“Pardon yourself,” Nan barked.
The jeweler smiled very slightly, then turned back to Lyra. “You have yourself a deal.”
Mile’s End looked just the same. This time, when Grayson exited their car and stepped onto the gravel drive in yet another pair of incredibly expensive shoes, he made no move to follow Lyra up to the porch—to her parents.
He leaned back against the car, waiting, giving them space.
Lyra needed to do this alone. She climbed the porch steps and stopped just short of her parents. So much had happened since the last time she’d been here, since the last time she’d spoken to them. She’d needed time to process all of it, including Katalin’s death.
And all that processing had led her back here. It had led her home.
Even just looking at her mom and dad—they still felt like home.
“I know you came to Scotland,” Lyra said.
“I’m assuming you hopped on a plane the second you saw that picture of me.
” That now very famous picture, the picture that defined a tragedy: a girl wild with grief, the wind in her hair, nothing but ruin in the background.
“I know you tried to come to Hawthorne House, too. I know you called.”
“You have the right to be upset with us,” her dad said, “but if you think we’re going to let you shut us out, young lady—”
“I don’t think that,” Lyra said. “And I don’t want to shut you out.
” She wasn’t a person who was wired to make the same mistake twice.
She had shut them out, for years, but she was done running, done hiding, done with pretending, once and for all.
She glanced back at Grayson, leaning against that car in an Armani suit, and then she turned back to her family, the people she would have died for, no questions asked. “Can we go inside?”
At the kitchen table, Lyra dug the fingers on her right hand into familiar grooves. “I know who I am.” Lyra’s left hand made its way to the gemstone she wore around her neck: simple and raw and not subtle in the least. “And I know who my parents are.”
Her mom’s face broke. There was no other word for the way it crumbled, and without even thinking, Lyra reached across the table to take her mom’s hand in hers.
“I have never,” Lyra said, “looked a thing like my mother, but I am just as stubborn as she is. I have her tenacity, and her sarcasm, and there is nothing that I wouldn’t do for the people I love.
” Lyra looked from her mom to her dad. “And I’ve always been my daddy’s girl.
Despite having a bit of a temper, I can be steady. I can be rock-solid.”
“You have your dad’s heart,” her mom said, her eyes welling up with tears. “And his sense of humor, which isn’t really a compliment.”
“There is nothing wrong with our sense of humor,” Lyra’s dad insisted.
“I also,” Lyra told her dad, “have your pride, which is why I know that you aren’t going to want to accept this.”
She removed the check from her pocket and slid it across the table.
“But I will remind you,” Lyra told her dad, “that I have Mom’s stubbornness, and you have never once won a fight with her.”
Even just saying the word Mom healed something in Lyra.
She’d had a chance—just one—to see Katalin’s body.
Grayson had made that happen, and for whatever reason, Bowen Johnstone-Jameson and the authorities in his pocket had let it happen.
And looking at the body of the woman who had given birth to her, of a woman who had looked so much like her, Lyra hadn’t felt a thing.
Family was a choice. Katalin Aquila Reyes had made hers, and it wasn’t Lyra, and Lyra wasn’t going to waste a single day mourning that, when she had this.
When she had always had this.
Lyra knew what love looked like. She’d grown up in a house where it was normal, where loving and being loved was the most natural thing in the world.
I made my choice, too, Lyra thought, and right about then, her mother recovered her voice.
“Lyra, where did you get this kind of money?”
“It’s a long story, Mom.”
“You know I love long stories, but for now, just tell me if this story of yours has a happy ending.”
“I’m okay,” Lyra said, “and I’m also not, and I’m okay with that, too. This story, my story—it isn’t over.” Their story wasn’t over. “I know who I am, and I know what I want, and—”
Before Lyra could finish that sentence, there was a yelp from outside. A very dignified yelp.
Lyra smiled. “Any idea where Cooper is?” she asked her parents.
“Hard to say,” her dad deadpanned.
Lyra stood and made her way toward the front door. “Would it, by any chance, still be water balloon season at Mile’s End?”
“Indeed,” her dad replied, opening the front door, “it is.”
Grayson was no longer leaning coolly against the car. He was on the move, as powerful, lethally graceful, and impressive as any soaking-wet man in an Armani suit possibly could be.
Lyra stepped out onto the porch and looked up—at Cooper’s bedroom. “Hi, Lyra!” Her brother launched two water balloons at once. Grayson dodged both, and Lyra knew instinctively that he was only wet because he’d let Cooper get a couple of shots in.
That very dignified yelp had been for show.
Lyra threw her head back and laughed. Day in, day out. Ordinary moments.
“Nothing wrong with our sense of humor,” her dad said, nudging Lyra with his elbow as a dripping Grayson made his way toward the porch. Cooper was either out of water balloons or biding his time.
“Sir,” Grayson greeted Lyra’s dad, and then he slid his eyes to Lyra and smiled, a real, truly devastating Grayson Hawthorne smile. “I might need to borrow a shirt.”
And here comes the actual last water balloon, Lyra thought, but she was a good enough big sister not to give away Cooper’s sneak attack. Somehow, though, she wasn’t surprised when Grayson raised a hand at the last second to catch it.
And then, he arched a brow at Lyra.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Drop it, Hawthorne.”
He cocked his arm slightly backward. “Is that an order… or a suggestion?”
“My revenge,” Lyra warned him, “will be epic.”
Grayson smirked. “Epic,” he told Lyra, “sounds just about right.”