One Salt Sea: An October Daye Novel

“You’re my daughter. You can be whatever you want to be.”


Bit by bit, her laughter stopped. The meadow behind her was getting misty, losing definition. I knew from my own Choice—the second one, the one Amandine led me through—that time here ran differently than it did in the real world; this was like a dream, and it could condense a great deal into a few seconds. We still didn’t have forever.

“You’re serious,” she said.

“Yeah, honey. I am.” I closed the rest of the distance between us, offering her my hands. “You’ve been hurt, but it’s going to be okay. I just need you to make a decision now, and then everything can be all right again.”

“What?” Gillian looked at me nervously. Her own hands stayed by her sides. The smell of primroses was strong this close to her, all but rolling off her skin.

“Your father’s human. I’m not. Right now, you’re somewhere in the middle, and that makes you vulnerable. The thing that hurt you, it’s going to hurt you worse if you stay where you are. So I need you to decide. You can be fae, or you can be human, but you can’t be both.”

Her eyes widened. “What? I can’t . . . you can’t mean that I . . .” She stopped in the middle of her sentence, suddenly focusing on a point just past my left shoulder. I knew what I would see if I turned around. I turned around anyway.

Another Gillian was standing behind me. This one’s sundress was red, still patterned with pink primroses. Her ears were sharply pointed, and her eyes were the no-color gray of mist rolling in off the water. There were streaks of gold in her dark brown hair. There was nothing human about her, and she was beautiful.

Next to her stood a third version of my daughter, this one wearing a white sundress. She was almost identical to the girl in front of me. There was a faint, nearly indefinable difference in the shape of her face and the way she held herself, but she was close to Gillian as she’d always known herself, and she was beautiful, too.

I tore my eyes away from these possible futures, turning my attention back to my daughter as she existed in the here and now. “Gillian.” She was still staring past my shoulder, awe and horror mixing in her expression. “Gillian. You need to choose. Either of them can be you, but, honey, we don’t have time to stand here arguing about which one it’s going to be.”

“What if I get it wrong?” Gillian met my eyes, fear finally washing away her awe. “What if I want to change my mind?”

“You can’t. This is a choice you only get to make once. You’re either fae, like me, or you’re human, like your father. Please.”

She hesitated again before asking, very softly, “Which one lets me go home?”

Her words stabbed me like knives. I forced my voice to stay level as I replied, “Human. You have to be human if you want to go home. If you choose fae . . . I’m sorry, honey, but if you choose fae, you have to stay with me.”

“Forever?” she whispered.

I couldn’t bring myself to answer that. I swallowed hard, and nodded.

“I . . . I want . . .” She stopped for a long moment before saying, rapid-fire, “I want you to take it all back. I want you to have never left us. You’re magic, right? Like a Fairy Godmother? Can you do that? Can you make it so you never went away?” Even her tears smelled like primroses.

“Nobody has that much magic, baby. I’m sorry. I love you, and I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.” She kept crying as she slid her hands into mine. “I love you, Mom. I wish you’d never gone away. I want to go home now. Please let me go home now.”

“You have to say the words, Gillian. You have to tell me what you want.”

She sighed. “I want to be human. I just want to go home.”