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“Excuseme,” she scoffs. “Youmeet a magical cryptid and see if you don’t have a million questions. If Bigfoot walked into your kitchen right now, pretty sure you’d have questions.”

“Bigfoot isn’t real,” I mutter.

Her jaw drops. “Are you kidding? You’re out here practically fueling podcasts worldwide and covering tabloid pages, and you’re telling me you don’t believe that Bigfoot might be real?”

“Is this what you’d like to discuss?”

“No.” She scowls. “Answer my questions.”

“I still don’t see why I should.”

“Because I can’t help you if I don’t know the facts!”

“And what makes you so sure you could help me?”

“I…” She looks thrown by the question, pausing with her lips parted as if she’d just been about to speak. She closes them, presses them together, an act that makes them look even fuller, and my eyes dart unwillingly to the soft pink of her mouth briefly before I drag them back to her eyes. “I guess I don’t know for sure,” she admits. “But I want to at least try. You said it was a curse, right? That doesn’t exactly sound like a fun time. That’s what you’re doing here, isn’t it? You said you were looking for answers. Let me help you.”

I narrow my eyes, studying her. She looks so…earnest. Guileless, even. It’s true that she wears every thought in her expression for the world to see, which means that it’s painfully obvious that Key truly wants to help me, that she thinks—or maybe just hopes—that she might be able to. I can’t make heads or tails of it. It goes against everything I know.

“I don’t understandwhyyou would want to help me,” I tell her honestly. “We’re not exactly friends. We don’t even like each other.”

Which I don’t, I confirm in my head.I don’t like her. I don’t care how bonnie she is.

“I’ll admit we’ve had…a rough start,” she ventures, reaching to rub her hand at her nape in a seemingly nervous gesture. “But I justfeel like…” She huffs out a breath. “Iknowthat I’m supposed to help you. It’s what my dad would have wanted.”

I frown. “You said that before, but it doesn’t make sense. Why on earth would Duncan want you to help me with this?”

“Because you saved him!”

I cock my head. “I…what?”

“I mean…Well. Now that I think about it, it couldn’t have beenyou—but someone like you.” She rubs her temples. “He told me this story so much growing up that I know it by heart. He was at the cove, and he fell, and he thought it was all over, but then—” Her eyes round as she looks at me earnestly. “Somethingsaved him. Something like you. I always wondered…” She bites her lip. “When I was a kid, I believed every single word. All of it. As I got older…part of me thought that it was just my dad’s way of bringing some kind of magic in my life, but…near the end…” Her hands clasp on the table in front of her, her fingers twisting as her brow furrows. “He was so adamant. So insistent that it was all real. In the end…it was theonlything he could remember.”

“Finlay told me,” I murmur, a bubble of discontent in my chest from seeing her so distraught. I reach to rub the spot. “He told me about your da and his illness.”

She nods solemnly. “It was just me and him in the end. I took a leave of absence from my job to care for him; I used to work for this small accounting firm back in New York. My boss was old friends with my dad, so he was very good to me as far as assuring me that my job would still be there. I didn’t know how much time he’d have before he—” She sucks in a shaky breath, her throat bobbing with a swallow. “After the pneumonia, he just…It’s like his body couldn’t do it anymore. Like he was just tired. He still hung on for four months after he got out of the hospital, though. His memories werea jumbled mess by then; hell, he barely knew who I was most days, always called me by my mom’s name.”

“I’m sorry,” I manage, not sure what else to say. It feels odd, sitting here and commiserating with her this way when I’ve known nothing but barbs and glares since the moment I met her. “That must have been terrible.”

She nods heavily. “It was.”

“But you don’t think you’ve already done enough?” I wonder. “Like you said, you already saved me.” I frown at my own words. “Do you even know how you did that?”

“I…” She bites her lip, and I can’t help but be drawn to the sight of her teeth worrying at the soft flesh. “I have no idea. That night is kind of hazy.” Her brows raise. “Do you have any idea?”

I do, actually, now that I’ve had time to think about it, but I’m not sure if she’s ready to hear it; if it weren’t for my own cursed predicament, I would say that it’s too fantastical to even consider.

“Does it matter?” I counter, ignoring the question for now. “My point is, you could argue that you’ve already paid this debt you’ve built up in your head. You don’t owe me anything.”

“You don’t understand.” Her eyes flash to mine with a determined glint. “My dad forgot almost everything about his life at the end, but heneverforgot that story. It was all he took with him.”

“But I don’t see why that would make you want to—”

“You saved him,” she says firmly. “Or, well, someone like you did. If you hadn’t…I never would have known him. I wouldn’t evenbehere.” She nods again, the motion resolute. “So if I can help you, then I owe it to whoever it was like you that pulled him out of the water that day to try.”

I sit across from her in stunned silence for several moments, and for every second that passes, her gaze never leaves mine. Her eyesseem so bright they almost burn, a fire in them that almost rivals the blazing curls framing her face. I realize she means every word of it. That in her mind, helping me is some final homage to the father she lost. Like saving me will somehow ease the pain of it. That it will somehow make it all not have been for nothing.

And knowing that…it hits far too close to home.