“…get territorial?”
“Yes.” He held out the papers with the pen on top. “I apologize for my behavior.”
Last night came back to me in a rush, and I let myself out of the gate. “Your text.”
“It was cowardly of me not to apologize in person.”
The reason I got rolled out of bed came back too. “Is that why you felt the need to stake out my yard?”
“Yes,” he said with enough hesitation I doubted it was his only reason.
“I got your text, but I was up late working on the contract. I fell asleep before I could respond.”
The contract was the exact version Megara and I drafted, and it was already signed by the director at the bottom.
“I’ll run in and sign this at the table.” I nudged open the gate. “Can I get you anything?”
“No.” He crouched, retrieved his stick, and resumed his whittling. “Thank you.”
No surprise, Colby met me at the door and trailed me to the kitchen table.
Palms spreading over the stack, I murmured a soft chant that would verify my assumption.
“The contract is identical.” Not so much as a punctuation mark had been corrected. “That’s good.”
“Then why are you scowling at it?” Colby sat on the papers. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
For me.
She left that part unspoken.
“Life is about compromise.” I scratched her head. “I do this, and we get to keep our life here.”
“We could run again.” She patted my hand with a foot. “We could buy another house, right?”
“I’ve spent a stupid amount of money Colby-sizing your game room. I’m not leaving it behind.”
That was only part of the truth, and she knew it, but she didn’t want to make this about her.
How much she recalled of her ordeal, I couldn’t say, and she wouldn’t tell me. She preferred to pretend I found her wild and tamed her. It hurt less than remembering she had been a little girl once, with parents and a family and a dog.
I collected pictures of them off social media and printed them to hang on her walls when she first came to live with me, but I found them balled up in the garbage. I tried again each time we moved, but I was starting to believe my need to fix unfixable things where she was concerned was more for me than her.
“I heard Megara.” She rolled the pen back and forth. “You do seem happier.”
“I missed Clay.” I couldn’t say his name without smiling. “I didn’t realize how much.”
“It’s hard hiding who and what you are from your friends.” Her antennae swiveled. “It’s like, okay, they’re your friends, but would they still be your friends if they knew the real you?”
This wasn’t about me, not really, but that was the safest way to address the answer.
“Sometimes the face you show one person might not be what another one sees. Our friends share our interests, but not all our interests. It’s okay to have different ones for different things. That a person only knows one side of you doesn’t make them any less your friend.”
“No one here knows you’re a witch,” she said thoughtfully, “so Clay is your witch-stuff friend.”
“Exactly.” I let her mull over that. “The relationship I have with him isn’t like the one I have with Arden and Camber. They have different hobbies than he does.” I poked her side. “Like viral food videos and cute boys.”
Antennae quivering, she stared up at me with big, round eyes. “What’s our thing?”