It had been so long since things had actually gone the way I wanted them to. To be perfectly honest, it made me really nervous. Like I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It had taken almost seven hours of standing around, intermittent interrogation, and allowing a virtual parade of Rainbow Cabal wizards to poke around the Clubhouse before they reluctantly agreed to let us go, albeit with the warning that we were still under observation. Violet, who I refused to call Lady, considering she looked to be a touch younger than me, had seemed more amused than suspicious after interviewing us, and I wasn’t about to resent her presence considering what had nearly happened to Marika.

If the Japanese girl was shaken by it, she didn’t show it. The impostor in the wizards’ ranks hadn’t even been escorted out of the clearing when Marika was already spinning a tale of intrigue and subterfuge, claiming the man as an obvious novice while simultaneously condemning the oblivious wizards. I was happy she was okay, obviously, but the incident as a whole hadn’t sat right with me. An impostor, in the Cabal of Vengeance? Outside of the clear dangers it presented the people who had to deal with them on a daily basis, it raised another question, chilling and intriguing both:

The Rainbow Nations had enemies?

What kind of force could actually stand against an organized nation of wizards? Their children had the kind of power that probably made military strategy a real headache, I couldn’t even begin to imagine how complicated an engagement between two wizard armies would be. I idly wished that my bridge with the local exchange wizards hadn’t been so successfully burned. I’m sure Heinrich would have been willing to have a conversation with me about it, if a government sanctioned one. Cheri might be able to tell me more, but she’d gone into hiding in the aftermath of the fight at the Clubhouse.

According to her, it was a pretty impressive feat of Compulsion magic that had allowed us to fool the mind-reading wizards. Something about disguising the memories of our interactions with her behind similar memories with others, and our memories of her existence behind our short-term awareness of the questions they were asking us. She’d been incredibly confident in her first explanation, but seven increasingly simplified explanations later she gave up and told us that she’d given our memories camouflage. Which seemed like a pretty understandable place to have started.

Still, the result was that the Tryhard Club’s resident wizard was now hiding out somewhere that only she and Tyler knew about, which was surprising to me. I hadn’t known that Tyler had a place all his own, somewhere comfortable enough to live, outside of my scope of awareness. I didn’t give him enough credit, it seemed. 

We were on Thanksgiving break, so it wasn’t particularly unusual that he spent all his time away from the house, but his absence at dinner made my dad suspicious. We were halfway through our evening meal, pork chops, mashed potatoes, and a vegetable medley, when the interrogation began.

“So, I take it the scheme has been going well?” Dad asked, interrupting a solid half-hour of relaxed silence. There wasn’t a hint of admonishment in his tone, just curiosity, so I didn’t feel too uncomfortable giving him a basic report. Light on details, of course.

“The scheme,” I answered around a mouthful of green beans and squash, pausing to finish it as he glared at me, “has been completed. A stunning success.”

He nodded slowly. “Good. No one hurt, no more trouble?”

“Nope. Clean getaway.”

“I figured as much,” he said. “You’ve moved like a weight’s off your shoulders, these last few days. And I haven’t seen Tyler this bouncy since he was small enough to ride my shoulders.”

I shrugged, but a smile played across my lips despite my nonchalance. I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t felt good. Both in having Cheri come back, and finally triumphing over the exchange. A part of me was truly excited for Thanksgiving break to end, so I could see the look on Julia’s face when she next saw me. I wouldn’t gloat, partly because I liked to think of myself as humble in victory, but mostly because I wasn’t sure she would keep to the truce if I pushed her too far. She seemed unstable, to say the least.

“Do you think it’s enough, yet?”

I froze with my fork halfway to my mouth. “What...do you mean? Enough of what?”

He made a show of cutting his pork chop, silently working the knife back and forth, but I knew him well enough to recognize when he was thinking of how to broach a difficult topic.

“I’ve been waiting,” he finally said, “for the last five years for you to get to a point where you can stop punishing yourself. Where you can accept that what happened wasn’t your fault. Where you can finally start to heal.”

My hands started to tremble. I set the fork down and took a deep breath. Oddly enough, the reaction felt light. I couldn’t be sure if it was the recent developments with the Tryhard Club, or maybe Cheri’s influence, but for the first time since it had happened, the wound didn’t feel quite so raw.

It still wasn’t pleasant.

“I’m not punishing myself, Dad,” I said quietly. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, but I could feel his gaze on me.

“Bullshit,” he answered, and the sudden curse surprised me enough that I glanced up for a moment. There were tears in his eyes, and his jaw was set. When he spoke, it was with more anger than I’d ever heard from him. “I haven’t seen an emotion stronger than relief on your face since your mother died. You haven’t done a single thing for yourself in half a fucking decade, Emily! Like you think that giving up your future to help other people is the only way to make things right!”

The place in the back of my mind where I kept all the painful, awful memories twisted and strained against me. The string of psychiatrists he’d taken me to in the months after the incident had all agreed on one thing: I needed to let the emotion out, needed to acknowledge the pain. I disagreed. There wasn’t anything good that could come from facing the guilt and the blame and the horror that were hopelessly entangled with my memories of that day.

The weight of the pain grew heavier with each passing day, the bleak corruption grew darker and darker the longer I refused to let it see the light, but it didn’t change the answer. If it became more and more horrible, what choice did I have but to keep it contained? Why would I want to let that awfulness out into the world, where it could hurt the people that I cared about?

Hadn’t I done enough damage?

So when I felt the darkness that burned in that shameful recess threaten to surge forth, I went on the defensive. I had to. I could feel myself teetering on the brink, and I knew that once I crossed that line there would be no coming back.

I took a deep, shaky breath. “You act like it’s a bad thing that I’m trying to help people. That’s what good people do. That’s what you do. That’s what...what Mom did.”

“What you do for those kids and what your mother did with her life could not be more different, Emily.”

I slammed a fist against the table. It was sturdy, made from oak and a single piece at that, but the impact still toppled my cup of milk and set the rest of the tableware clattering.

“You think I don’t know that?” I shouted, hating how impotent, how childish it sounded. “I’m trying to be a better person, Dad! I’m trying to do as much as I can, to make up for what I did! What more do you want from me?!”

He had dropped his silverware when I hit the table, his hands pressed to his face, fingers interlocked as if in prayer. I couldn’t see his eyes or his expression, and for a moment I thought I’d pushed him to tears.

I was mistaken. When his hands fell, it was with a heavy sigh, and the face they revealed just looked tired. It struck me that I’d never looked at my father’s face and thought he looked old, but in that moment I could see the touch of time on him. The lines around his eyes that seemed to deepen with the heavy sadness in them, the grey in his balding hair.

“When you were seven,” he said quietly, a stark difference in the tone the conversation had before my outburst, “you made me a flower crown for my birthday, and brought me breakfast in bed. Your mother watched you make it, but you told her that you wanted to do it yourself and insisted she not help you.”

I remembered that, vaguely. Pancakes and syrup, bacon and eggs. I’d prepared the flower crown from the garden of perennials my mother tended in the backyard.

“In the end, you couldn’t eat it,” I said. I’d burned the bacon, undercooked the eggs, and I managed to completely miss the step in the pancake batter recipe where it called for sugar. He’d tried a bite of each, and then he and my mother had broken down laughing. He set the platter aside, pulled me into a hug, and we spent the rest of the morning watching T.V. together in bed. 

“It was a pretty miserable failure,” he agreed. “But you were still so happy to have tried. Pancake batter smeared on your face, a virtual disaster area in the kitchen downstairs, a pile of inedible waste on the nightstand, and you looked so proud of yourself. You were always like that. We both knew you’d go far, exceed us both easily, because of that eagerness, that brilliant smile that faced everything in front of it with excitement and confidence.”

A tear traced a path down one of his cheeks, and he sniffed hard. “I know it’s been hard on you, hard on Ty. It breaks my heart to see you suffering like this. But I lost twice, on that day. I buried my wife, and then I had to watch my fearless little girl cut away everything she could have been to make room for what she thought she had to be.”

The words hit me like a punch in the gut. It felt unfair, that he was putting that on me, but what about this situation was ever going to be fair? I remembered the days that followed Mom’s death, finding Dad and Tyler together in the living room, or in Tyler’s room. Dad silently weeping while Tyler clung to him, bawling. I remembered the pain on his face as he met my empty, tearless eyes, remembered him motioning me forward, wordlessly asking me to join them in their grief. I remembered the guilt that drove me to turn away, to flee that undeserved solace.

It had never occurred to me that he’d lost a daughter that day too.

He stood abruptly, and I pushed my chair back and climbed to my feet as well. I made to approach him, but he pulled away, crossing the dining room to where a small arched opening separated it from the kitchen. He stopped there, one arm on the wall, the other hand wiping the tears from his eyes.

“I want you to go,” he said.

My blood turned to ice at the words.

“I just...I don’t think I can have you here right now. Please. Go, get Tyler, go to the fair or something. See a movie. I’ll pull myself together before you get back.”

I felt like I was a passenger in my own body. My body went on autopilot, shuffling to the front hallway, grabbing a jacket from the closet and leaving without any real need for my input. There were no thoughts resonating in my head, no plan, no emotion of any kind, really. I just felt empty, like everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever worked for had been a lie. A waste.

The sun had set nearly a half hour earlier, but it still took almost twenty minutes of walking in the cold night air to snap me out of my trance. When I looked up, I was a good mile and a half from my house, in the suburban cluster of cookie-cutter homes where Marika lived. I didn’t want to see her, of course, didn’t want to see any of my friends in the state I was in. I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts.

Not that there was refuge to find there. Not anymore.

I found a bus stop, one of the small glass enclosures that abated the worst of the wind, and stopped there. I sat down on the bench, drew my knees up to my chest and my face against the cold glass, wishing, not for the first time, that all the awfulness in my life had been just a dream. That I might wake up, years and years before, to find it had all just been a fantasy, an incredibly vivid nightmare. But wishes don’t come true. It was inherent in the nature of a wish, that what was sought was guaranteedly out of reach.

I felt the tears slowly building, and I screwed my eyes shut to hold them back. I took a deep breath, trying to control the exhalation only to find myself almost utterly incapable. It came out shaky, and the corresponding breath in was a sob.

“Are you alright, miss?”

My eyes flew open, the moisture of the suppressed tears still tangled in my lashes. There was a woman, standing at the other entrance to the enclosure, her eyebrows knit together in worry. She wore a nice-looking heavy coat, the type of fur coat that you could tell was most definitely not fake. It looked incredibly warm, and ran all the way down to just below her knees. She had a hood up, and a scarf was wound around her lower face. She seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place my finger on it.

“I’m fine,” I said, straightening to a normal seated position. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” the woman said, moving into the enclosure to sit down. She stayed a polite distance away from me, but it was clear from the way she turned towards me that she was still concerned. “People don’t weep without reason.”

I laughed, though it emerged still heavy with emotion. She was right, though her phrasing was a little odd. Old-fashioned.

“I’m an open ear, if you wanted to vent,” she said. She breathed on her hands and rubbed them together before putting them back into her pockets. In the brief glimpse, I saw that her hands were heavily scarred. They weren’t mangled, by any stretch, but lines of shiny flesh criss-crossed the backs, and the side of the hand closest to me was puckered and shriveled, like it had been badly burned.

For whatever reason, the sight of those hands, the proof of suffering, pushed me past what would have normally been a polite refusal. I felt an odd kinship to the woman, like she might actually understand.

“Five years ago,” I began, “I lost my mother.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman replied, a quiet murmur that sounded rather automatic. It was a basic courtesy, I guess.

“Thanks. It was hard on my brother, even harder on my Dad...but I was there, you know? She died protecting me, and if I’d been a little smarter, a little faster, she wouldn’t have needed to. She’d still be here with the family she loved. I’ve lived my life since then like...I don’t know. Like if I didn’t give one hundred percent, if I didn’t help as many people as I could, I’d be insulting her memory. I cost the world one of the bravest women I’ve ever known, so don’t I have a duty to take up that mantle?”

The woman made a thoughtful sound. “I always thought it was in the nature of duties to be chosen. Responsibilities can be inherited, debts incurred, but what a person considers to be their purpose in life is always up to them.”

“So it should be fine,” I said, “if I chose the path I’m on? It was my decision, after all.”

“Was it? It seems more to me like you felt there was no choice. Everyone deals with guilt in their own way, but…” The woman paused, leaning her head back against the enclosure behind her. “...it seems to me that using your mother’s death as an excuse to live anything less than the fullest, happiest life possible isn’t just the wrong choice. It feels like an insult to the sacrifice of a great woman.”

My hands clenched into fists as the tears threatened to return. She was right. Damn it, but she was right. What had I been thinking, all this time? My mother was the strongest, most forgiving woman I knew. When it came to Tyler and me, at least.

“You’re right,” I said softly. “I’m not sure what that means for me, going forward, but...I feel better now. Thank you.”

“Well,” the woman answered, “if your mother was your hero, and it sounds like she was, try doing what you think your mother would have done, and not what you think your mother would expect you to do.”

I smiled. “Did you learn that from your mother?”

The woman shook her head. “I didn’t have a mother. I learned it by becoming a mother. Though I’m not doing great in that regard.”

“I bet you’re doing better than you think,” I responded. Spur of the moment, I stuck a hand out towards her. “I’m Emily, by the way. Emily Browman.”

“Glory Vinaldi,” the woman said, taking my hand and shaking it. “I’m Cheri’s mother.”

My eyes widened, though I blanked my expression a moment later. Her grip on my hand tightened like a steel vise.

“Too late,” she said, and the world around me disappeared.