Epilogue
Ash never came back.
Callie didn’t know what she expected.
Well, no. That wasn’t true. She just wanted to be proven wrong—and she wasn’t.
The name hadn’t worked. Deep down, she still harbored the hope that he would pop into her living room, shattering a few light bulbs or shorting out her toaster oven in his wake.
With an arrogant tilt of his head and his come-hither smile, he would tell her he still wanted her, that nothing was as it seemed.
Callie held onto that hope for two months. And when summer turned to fall and there was still no sign of Ash, she had to admit that it was time to move on.
So she did.
The first old habit to go was her outside visits.
Her daily trips to the park turned to weekly stops before she gave up on heading to that location.
Telling herself that she had plenty of pictures of the trees in their fall foliage—her most recent excuse to go to park and hopefully see Ash—she finally focused on turning her film into prints that might possibly sell.
She had thousands of photos from her sessions in the park, and if she needed more, there were hundreds of others she could visit.
If she was lucky, they wouldn’t have a tear in the veil like the one near her apartment. No goblins. No fairies. No kobolds.
No fae.
Definitely no fae.
Callie had spent the first twenty years of her life fighting against her sight.
It had been too easy to rely on it while she was with Ash, but now that he was gone, Callie went back to ignoring anything wearing glamour.
It was safer that way, and after a while she decided her summer fling with Ash was just another in a long line of lessons she’d learned the hard way.
Never trust the fae.
But she could trust Mitch.
During her trip to Faerie, Callie lost two whole days, proving that Ash was at least being honest when he said that time moves differently in his realm.
Buster was pretty annoyed that she missed a shift, but with a promise that it would never happen again, he let her keep her job.
Since she was still concerned about paying all of her expenses without a roommate, she needed to work, and Buster’s was the foot in the door she needed for her budding photography career.
Three weeks after she returned from Faerie, though, Mitch showed up at the apartment.
With a sheepish expression and an explanation that he obviously doubted held any water, he asked if he could move back in.
It had been an irrational, impulsive decision to move out over the summer, but now that he was thinking more clearly, he realized that he wanted his old room back.
Callie of course welcomed him with open arms, though her smile couldn’t quite hide her sadness.
Because the second Mitch said he wanted back in, she knew for sure that all those suspicions she struggled to bury were true.
Ash had done something to her roommate—compelled him, glamoured him, tricked him…
something—to make him leave. Seeing Mitch standing in the hallway, a duffel bag at his feet, his hand nervously scratching the side of his neck, Callie finally had to accept that Ash wasn’t coming back.
Because if he was? Mitch wouldn’t be.
Her roommate never talked about his urge to leave after he moved in again.
Callie was careful not to bring it up. All too easily, everything went back to the way it was before Ash suddenly stalked into her life at the beginning of the summer.
And while little things—the sunshine, a golden chain, even a blown fuse—still reminded Callie of Ash, she got over his rejection because, well, it wasn’t like she had a choice.
He might be a powerful, nearly immortal being. Callie was human. She only got to live life once, a measly century at most, and she couldn’t waste it mooning over the male she hadn’t even wanted at first all because he decided he didn’t want her, either.
And maybe she would have been able to fully get over Ash in time—if it wasn’t for the fact that he left something behind.
At first, Callie blamed the stress of it all.
She didn’t have any idea what those fiery portals the Light Fae used to travel between the human world and Faerie would do to someone like her, and causing her to be late seemed like a pretty plausible side effect.
After all, she had lost a few days of real life time though she probably spent an hour at most on the other side of the veil.
It made sense that it could’ve done something to her cycle, too.
She figured the first month was a fluke. The second? She started to worry. By the time she hit her third month and she still hadn’t had her period, Callie realized that hoping and wishing and praying that she was wrong was just as helpful as ignoring Ash had been once he set his sights on her.
Mitch had been watching her curiously lately, too, which put her back up against the wall.
Her jeans felt a little bit tighter, and her hormones were out of whack.
When her shoe lace ripped in half as she was tying her sneakers one day and she had a crying fit over it that lasted ten minutes, Callie traded her sneakers for her pair of ballet slipper flats, grabbed her purse, and headed toward the nearest pharmacy.
It was her morning off. No surprise: Mitch was at work, putting in as much overtime as possible in a bid to show his gratitude at his office taking him back after he abruptly quit over the summer.
And while her roommate was going above and beyond to make up for his strange behavior—and, likewise, Callie did the same for him since she felt super guilty that Ash had to be responsible for screwing up Mitch’s life the way he did—she knew that he would have something to say about Callie buying a pregnancy test.
Like, oh, who could the daddy be?
As far as he was aware—as far as anyone Callie knew was aware—she hadn’t been in a relationship since high school.
Her last one night stand was more than a year ago.
And whether she’d been subconsciously protecting herself or not, she’d kept Ash her very own secret since the fateful afternoon she first saw him in the park.
Of course, there was a good chance she was overreacting.
She’d come to terms with the fact that the fae thought of humans as barely more than simple pets or playthings; to Ash, she was a lay he had to work hard for, but the way he pursued her made it clear in hindsight that that was what the fae did.
They took what they wanted, and convinced their targets to give them whatever they couldn’t take.
If he could get her pregnant, wouldn’t he have said something? Or would he have thought she’d consider herself fortunate to bring more of Ash into existence?
No. It couldn’t be. A fae sullying his line by reproducing with a human? The arrogant bastard that Ash proved to be at heart would never.
Callie clung to that final desperate hope as she tore open the box and read the instructions. A few minutes in the bathroom, then a few more waiting as she paced the matchbox-sized space, all the while assuring herself that it would show one line instead of the dreaded two.
She’d left the tester stick on top of the plastic wrapper, both of them resting on the edge of the bathroom sink. Her eyes were glued to the wall clock, counting down the moments until she could prove that she was worrying over nothing.
Her hands were trembling as she reached for the test. A deep breath in, then a shaky shudder out when the two blue lines stared right back at her from the tiny window.
Callie slumped down on the toilet, the stick hanging limply in her hand.
Pregnant.
She was pregnant.
And she had no way of letting Ash know that he was going to be a father.