I took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure now whether I wanted to know the answer to my next question, but I plowed on anyway.
“I came to ask you about something else as well. I know you may not want to talk about it, but I really need to know what happened between you and my mother,” I said, and leaned my elbows on the table. “You must have known her if you and my grandmother were as close as you say.”
Neila glanced at me and looked away. She sighed and seemed to crumple into herself.
“I gave your mother some bad news a long time ago and she’s avoided me ever since.”
My chest squeezed as I realized the kind of news she must have shared.
“You think my mother will outlive one of her children?”
Neila nodded and wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“Do you know which—”
She held up her hand and shook her head.
“I don’t know which child it will be. I hope that I’m wrong. I’m sorry, Clytemnestra.”
“Well, that explains a lot about my mother,” I said. I thought about her overprotectiveness, her insistence that I use my abilities to protect myself, her vocal disapproval of my choice to go to police academy. She must have been concerned I was in constant danger.
“When did you give her this news?”
Neila watched me for a moment. “When you were just a toddler. I don’t even think you were talking yet. Your grandmother and mother brought you and Grace to see me. Your grandmother had a knack for reading faces and picking up on subtle things. She knew I’d seen something and badgered me until I told her.” Neila hugged herself and pulled her shawls more tightly around her shoulders.
I sensed there was more and waited.
“Your mother gathered up you and your sister and left. I haven’t spoken to her since then. Agnes brought you here sometimes, but I never saw Grace or Rose again.”
*
I left Neila’s house and drove slowly back toward home. It was one of the few times in my life when I wished I had just let things slide. Neila was right—sometimes it’s better not to know. I thought about my own premonitions and how they were just gloomy predictions of doom. I knew that because I hadn’t honed the talent, or ever fully tested it, I tended to interpret the dreams in the worst light possible. Last summer I had been sure that Mac was in danger and things hadn’t turned out that way at all. My efforts to protect him had only complicated matters.
These dreams about Seth really bothered me. I couldn’t tell if they were related to what had happened to Rafe, or whatever was going on with Seth in New York, but it seemed pretty clear to me that he was in danger and that I would be useless as a rescuer.
Seth. We’d left things undecided the day before. We had to make a decision, and soon. I pulled into my driveway and shut off the car. I wondered if, when we were done talking, I would feel the same about his truths as I did about Neila’s.
I found him camped out in his room, dogs watching his every move as he ate chips and clicked away on his computer.
He looked up when I came in. “Hey,” he said, and smiled.
I moved some clothes off the only chair in the room and sat.
His smile faded to a wary line.
“We need to talk about your plans for going back to New York.”
He clicked rapidly on the keyboard and then folded up the laptop.
“’Kay.”
“You can’t just do your homework through e-mail for the rest of the year. You have to be in classes.”
I was surprised when he nodded. “Yeah, I know. I looked into transferring to Crystal Haven High.”
“What? Do your parents know?”
“Kind of. I told them I didn’t want to continue at my own school. A lot of the kids I was with in elementary school go to boarding school now. There are some really good ones, and my mom and dad have mentioned it a bunch of times.”
“Boarding school? That’s what you want?”
“No, not at all. But I told them it would be no different than if they sent me to boarding school. They couldn’t really argue with that.”
I sat back and narrowed my eyes at him. “When were you and your mother planning to tell me you had moved in?”
He grinned. “Now seems good. Dylan’s out of jail, the Fall Fun Fest is over, so I guess we could talk about it.”
I started to wish I hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning.
“Your mom is okay with you going to CH High?”
He lifted a shoulder and tilted his head. “She went there.”
“That’s different. She lived here.”
“Yeah, that’s why I want to move here. I can’t take it in New York. There’s just too much noise, and I’m not talking about traffic. The animals there are . . . well . . . pushy.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“How are they pushy?”