Chapter 29
Alanna
The sun glints off the downtown high-rises, striking my eyes as the city goes by outside the cab window.
Busy sidewalks full of straggling office workers clutching their coffee cups, a delivery truck rumbling past, parents pushing strollers—all oblivious to the fact that a creature of nightmare threatened to tear through this city less than twenty-four hours ago. The Wardens are excellent at their job.
The city has already put the past behind it. And now, it’s my turn.
A younger me would be a bundle of nerves, my old abandonment wound taking over any rational thought.
But as the taxi pulls up to St. Joseph’s Hospital, I’m surprisingly calm.
I am not a broken girl cringing from past hurts anymore.
For the first time in thirteen years, I feel ready to hear my father out.
His room is on the fourth floor. The door is slightly ajar, and I push it open gently, slipping inside.
It’s quiet except for the soft beep of the monitors.
In the bed, my father lies on his back, staring vacantly at the blank wall opposite him.
He looks smaller somehow, diminished by the stark white bandage taped to his temple and the sling cradling his broken arm.
He seems lost in thought, or perhaps he’s reliving last night.
At my entrance, his head turns. Then, a bright smile overtakes him.
“Alanna. You came.”
“I said I would,” I say, not sure how to be now that I’m here. He risked his life for me and Em yesterday—but he abandoned us when Em was a baby. I don’t know quite how to reconcile those things in my head.
There’s a beat of uncomfortable silence while we stare at each other.
He’s the one to break it, his gaze flicking to the empty visitor’s chair. He clears his throat. “Your mom picked up Em last night. She’s not injured.”
Maybe he was going for a safe, fatherly topic, but the explanation rankles me. As if I wasn’t keeping tabs on Em after what happened. As if I wouldn’t have been here all night with her if she’d been injured.
As if Mom and I haven’t had to look out for her—without him—since I was thirteen.
“I know.”
“Good. That’s good.” Another silence descends, heavier this time. His throat bobs with a hard swallow. The relief on his face is gone, replaced by a pain that has nothing to do with his injuries.
“Alanna, I—” He takes a shaky breath and tries again. “At the festival. When that . . . explosion happened.” He frowns, rubbing his temple. “The malfunction, or whatever it was. And you—you were so brave.”
I hold my breath, waiting for him to ask about the way I glowed. Or about the shadows.
But he doesn’t.
The clean-up crew. Kade warned me they would have been to the hospital by now, nudging memories to fit a safe, non-magical narrative. Dad doesn’t remember the echo-beast. Just the fear.
“You ran right at it.” He squeezes his eyes closed, anguished at the memory. “You aren’t the little girl I remember anymore. All I could think was—what if this was it? And all those years. I’d missed them all. What if you died?” His voice goes hoarse. “And I never had a chance to know you.”
He reaches out toward me, but I can’t bring myself to take his hand.
Still, I look at him. Really look at him.
With his wet eyes, his graying hair, his desperation and regrets.
He’s just a man. And isn’t it a terrible thing, to realize your parents are just people? It ruins the anger. It steals the hate.
The longstanding resentment in my chest begins to thaw, replaced by a flicker of something I haven’t felt for him in a long time. Sympathy.
My voice is quiet when I finally speak, the hard edge gone. “If you wanted to know me, why did you leave, Dad?”
He hunches inward, like his shoulders are bowing under the weight of an invisible burden.
“After Em was born, your mom and I . . . it wasn’t working between us. I mean, it wasn’t working long before that, but we were trying to hold it together. For you. For both of you. But we were fighting all the time. We were making each other miserable.”
As he speaks, my magic reaches out, as if drawn to the truth. Instead of just hearing his words, I feel the echoes of that old, suffocating unhappiness. The toll of a broken marriage. The strain of a life falling apart.
“Were Em and I making you miserable too?” The question is small, a child’s question I didn’t know I was still carrying. Then, the fear I’ve held close to my chest for so long finally falls out. “Why didn’t you want us?”
He can’t meet my eyes, staring instead at his hands lying on the thin hospital blanket.
“How could I fight for custody when I could barely even afford my own apartment? I thought it would make it easier to send money back, so at least I could provide. But now I see . . . I think maybe I was just afraid. It was so much easier to run from the pain than to face it every day.”
He looks up again. “I always thought, ‘I’ll go back next year. I’ll be ready next year.
’ But ‘next year’ just kept coming, and with each one, it felt harder and harder to bridge that gap.
” His eyes swim with unshed tears. “And then I looked up, and you were grown. And you hated me. And I knew I deserved it.”
His pain is so raw, so real, it cracks open my own. Moisture wells in my eyes. “I thought you left because of me,” I whisper. “Before you left, I’d ask you so many questions, I’d want you to spend time with me, and you’d get so annoyed. I thought I was too much. I thought I drove you away.”
Horror fills his features. “Oh, Al, no. Is that what you’ve thought all this time?”
I can only nod, the movement stiff and jerky.
“God, no,” he says, his voice thick with regret.
“I was never annoyed with you. I was drowning. My business was failing, your mom and I were at each other’s throats.
I was coming apart at the seams. And you’d come to me with your questions and your big feelings, and I didn’t have anything left to give.
My head was always somewhere else, on all of the other stuff.
I know I must have been . . . short with you.
And Em—I was never patient enough with her either, never really present.
” His face is earnest, like he needs me to believe his next words.
“But it was never you, Alanna. It was always me.”
And there it is. The truth. It wasn’t my fault.
The story I’ve told myself since age thirteen—that I’m too intense, too curious, too much—suddenly seems brittle. The conclusion of a girl with no answers, trying to understand a complicated situation. What he did—it was still shitty. But now, at least, maybe I can finally put it down.
The tears don’t stay in my eyes anymore; they spill over, hot and cleansing, washing away years of misplaced guilt.
“I never knew,” I whisper. “All this time . . . I thought it was my fault.”
He shakes his head, his own tears falling freely. “That’s on me, then. I shouldn’t have let you think that for even a second. I’m sorry.”
It isn’t a miraculous fix for over a decade of absence. Knowing he was overwhelmed and afraid and that he’s sorry doesn’t undo the nights that I waited for a call that never came, or the birthdays he missed, or the fact that I had to watch Mom do it all on her own.
But it’s a beginning. A place to start.
I reach across the gap between us and take his hand.
Walking out of the hospital and into the autumn breeze feels like stepping into a new life. I take a cab, not to my apartment, but to the only place I want to be.
When I push open the heavy door to the den, Kade is there, leaning against the table, waiting. He stands the moment our eyes meet, his gaze asking the single question that matters. I drop my purse on the floor, walk straight into his arms, and bury my face in his chest.
He holds me tight, his chin resting on the top of my head, and I finally let go of the girl who was left behind. I am home.
***
The following Saturday, the bell above the coffee shop door rings its familiar chime.
It’s strange walking in.
Everything is so unfailingly ordinary. The smell of roasting coffee and steamed milk.
The student hunched over a laptop, the barista calling out an order for a cappuccino.
All this normalcy feels mundane in the loveliest way—but I could never truly go back to it, not now.
Not when there’s a whole supernatural world of knowledge and discoveries waiting for me.
Not with this magic humming under my skin, singing in my blood.
And not when I’m in love with a 133-year-old wolf shifter. A giddy, secret smile threatens to break out across my face.
And there they are, at our usual table by the window.
Lizzy is leaning forward, gesturing animatedly with her hands as she tells a story, while Jen is laughing, her whole body shaking.
My stomach does a nervous flip. I’ve rehearsed my story a dozen times in my head.
I can’t tell my friends the whole truth, perhaps, but I can’t live a life of lies, either.
Lizzy notices me first, stopping mid-story. She grins. “Alanna! Oh my god!”
Jen jumps up, and before I can even slide into the booth, I’m enveloped in a tight, three-way hug.
“You’re not allowed to disappear like that ever again,” Lizzy says, her hands on my shoulders, her expression a mix of loving concern and mild accusation.
“For real, Alanna. We were so worried, you bitch,” Jen says, the cuss full of affection.
“First you’re sick, then you’re on some secret work trip, then you show up at the hospital with some scary guy who looks like a bodybuilder.
” She takes a sip of her coffee, eyeing me over the rim like she’s interrogating a suspect.
“And you were all weird and evasive, not even texting me back half the time. Now—you have to tell us everything. Starting with him.”