Page 6

“I don’t want to take your parka, Val.”

“Take the fucking parka, Taavi. I’ll feel much worse if you’re cold than if I am.”

He opened his mouth as though he were going to argue with me, then changed his mind and took the parka. I made us stop at a bench so he could put it on, then led the way out the door and into the Wisconsin winter cold, looking for my parents’ dark red Ford Explorer.

I’d just pulled my mask off my ears when I heard him gasp behind me.

“How do peoplelivehere?”

I laughed, turning around to find a horrified expression on Taavi’s face as he hugged himself, his duffel over one shoulder and his hands shoved in his own armpits.

“There are gloves in the right pocket,” I told him, finding his reaction oddly endearing.

He fished the gloves out. They were much too big for his hands, but he didn’t seem to care, tugging them on, anyway.

“Seriously, Val. How do people livehere?” He’d pulled his gaiter down off his face, and his breath clouded in the air in front of him.

I laughed, my own breath also condensing in front of me. “You get used to it.”

I was cold, though. I had on a blue long-sleeve t-shirt and a flannel, but I hadn’t bothered with a sweater or sweatshirt because I had a parka. A parka that was now being worn by my very cold, Yuma-born, shifter boyfriend.

I suppressed a shiver. Iwascold, but I wasn’t about to let Taavi see that. It was a point of pride. True Wisconsinites don’t show that they’re cold unless they’re butt-ass naked in a snowbank with a windchill of fifteen below.

It was cold, but it wasn’tthatcold.

I could make it a couple more minutes while my dad pulled around, presumably with my mother yelling at him about not cutting people off, which everyone knows is the only way you can actually pull over in an airport pick-up zone. So even though they’d been here for at least twenty minutes—because that’s the kind of person my mom is—they were circling and would pick us up in another five or so. Because therulessaid you couldn’t pull over and wait, even though every other person on the planet pulled over to wait.

A horn made me turn my head to see my father having ignored my mother’s directions not to cut people off so that he could pull his SUV up to the curb just behind us. Through the windshield, I could see a shit-eating grin plastered across the familiar features that I used to see the younger version of in the mirror every day. Until my life and my face changed overnight.

I still saw a stranger—a beautiful stranger—in the mirror, although a decade on I was starting to get used to it.

My dad stayed in the car, but not Mom. Nope. She leaped out, barely waiting for the wheels to stop rolling, and launched herself at me with a shriek.

My mom is like five-four, which put her dead-even with Taavi and eye-level with my armpit. And she was now squeezing the shit out of my waist, making that weird humming noise people make when they hug you really tightly.

I hugged her back, although much less enthusiastically—I’m a lot stronger, and I didn’t want to start this hell-scape trip by breaking my mother’s ribs.

“Oh, Val, sweetie, it’s sogoodto see you!” she cooed into my chest. “Poor Elliot, though! It’s soterrible!”

I muttered something that I hoped sounded like agreement into the top of her brown-and-grey pixie cut.

“Did you talk to him today?”

“Texted,” I answered. I’d let him know when we’d boarded the flight out of Richmond, and I’d gotten athank you for comingby the time we’d landed. I’d send him another one to let him know we were on the road when Dad got us out of the airport loop.

“That poor boy.”

Elliot wasn’t any more a ‘boy’ than I was—he’d just turned forty-one—but moms are moms, and I guess we’re always going to be kids to mine.

“It sucks,” I agreed.

“I just saw Gregory last week,” my mother continued, her eyes welling up, and I felt a stab of guilt for not thinking about how this would hit my parents. Yeah, Gregory was Elliot’s dad, and he’d been a pseudo-dad to me, but he’d also been friends with my folks because El and I were friends. He and my dad went fishing together, and I know my mom had helped out Gregory and Elliot when Naomi, Elliot’s mom, died from cancer.

It was a bit of a slap upside the head to remember that my parents had lost their friend, too.

Fuck.

I hugged my mom a little tighter, and she turned a watery smile up at me. “Okay, then.” She sniffed a little, then stepped back and frowned.