“Madison is interested in the intro crochet class,” Mom reminded him. “Lori has teenage girls and she’d sign all three up for a class to knit fingerless mitts if we add it to the schedule.”
Nick obediently inserted the notes, but as much as he admired his mom’s dedication, he couldn’t ignore her pallor or the dark circles under her eyes anymore. After saving his work, he walked around the antique bar upon which the shop’s computer rested and enveloped one of Mom’s hands in his. “You promised not to overdo.” He guided her to an overstuffed sofa in the casual seating area of the shop floor. “Sit. I’ll finish closing.”
That Mom settled into her seat was as good as a neon sign of how exhausted she must feel after her first full day back at the shop. She waved to the classroom doorway. “My knitting—”
“I’ll get it.” He retrieved the heather shawl she was working on and his own project too: a Fair Isle toboggan using worsted wool in a light-cream shade for the main color and a robin’s-egg blue for the contrasting snowflake pattern. Both the shawl and hat would serve as exemplars promoting next month’s classes, and because of a flurry of medical appointments last week, each project had fallen behind schedule. Instead of counting the night’s receipts, he joined his mom. “Tea?”
Mom arranged her yarn and knitting needles in her lap. “No, I’m fine.”
She wasn’t, not yet, but she would be. A silk scarf wrapped the crown of her head to mask the ravages of chemotherapy, but short stubble had begun growing back—curly and black now. Her hair had been a thick and straight chestnut brown before. Nick nevertheless welcomed this first hint of his mom’s life returning to normal—or whatever passed for normal after cancer. He sat with her, and the click of their needles soon filled the quiet. The soothing sound accompanied his best memories. And his worst.
“I’ve been thinking.” He frowned at his yarn as he switched between colors for the snowflake pattern.
“Mm-hmm?”
“About your medical bills.”
When he glanced up, his mom sighed. “If I sell the Caravan—”
“You’ll need it for our booth when the farmer’s market restarts in the spring.” He thinned his lips. “We can’t haul the displays in my Kia, and you already sold Dad’s truck.”
A stubborn groove furrowed her brow. “You moved home from the apartment over the shop so we could rent it.”
He nodded. “Paying tenants are the only reason we could afford monthly installments on the hospital bills so far.”
“Your brother helped too.”
Stifling his wince, Nick continued knitting. “Winter is coming. His boss always lays him off once the snows hit.”
Until last year’s diagnosis, Nick—and his mom, in fact—had financially supported his brother during the farm’s off-season. Rolan paid them back when work returned with warm weather, and truthfully, Nick wouldn’t have been able to keep them afloat without extra help from Rolan over the summer when Nick had closed the shop to accompany their mom to weekly chemo infusions. Rolan had taken on side jobs to cover their lost income.
“You boys have done a lot, and I’m truly grateful.” His mom flashed a strained smile. “I wouldn’t have made it through treatment without either of you.”
Nick doubted that. Rosalind Goode was exceptionally tough, the strongest woman he’d ever met. When the heart attack took Dad during Nick’s teens, his mom had overcome her grief to open the shop despite naysayers who’d discouraged her from investing insurance money in such a risky proposition. She’d been a stay-at-home parent to a pair of unruly sons, they’d said. What did she know about managing a business? Without Dad’s income, she’d needed work, and knitting was what she knew. All she knew. The war had disrupted her education, but rather than learning a trade like Dad, she’d focused on raising their family once the fighting had ended. As a new widow, she’d recognized an unfulfilled need in the post-war community, though, and capitalized on it. Years later, when doctors had diagnosed her cancer, she’d also faced the disease with steadfast aplomb. She hadn’t complained. Despite chemotherapy that had exhausted and depleted her, surgery, and radiation burning her to a crisp, she’d soldiered on.
His mom could do anything.
“I need to start handling my problems myself again.” She nodded once, decisively. “I can’t keep relying on my children. I want you to live your own life. Every parent wants that.”
Nick scowled. “The bills—”
“—are my problem,” she finished.
“They don’t need to be.” He frowned at his knitting. “The money is sitting in Wallach.” He bit his lip, hardly daring to peep at his mom beneath his lashes. “They intended it for me, at least in part.”
She stilled, the industrious click of her needles halting.
He held his breath.
“They intended many things, I imagine.” She yanked on her wool. “Above all, I’m betting they would have wanted their last surviving child to stay safe.”
At best, His Imperial Majesty Eton Marisek had been a dangerously incompetent ruler. Nick had filched his college roommate’s ID to prevent a trail that might have drawn unwanted attention and used it to check out books and old newspaper accounts of the revolution. Nick’s earliest childhood memories were of Eton and Olina’s devotion to their family, but at the same time, the emperor and empress had dragged the tribes they’d ruled into ruinous war with humans in the borderlands, imposed heavy taxes on the peasantry to pay for it, and turned a blind eye to rampant corruption among the aristocracy. The wonder wasn’t that the peasants had rebelled, only that they hadn’t done so sooner. The emperor and empress had made disastrous choices. Nick was reasonably confident, had they lived, they would’ve continued their poor judgment by urging him to align with the post-rebellion resistance to regain the throne. They would have considered such lunacy an obligation. No price would’ve been too high nor any risk too dear to reestablish the crown that had ruled for four centuries.
He couldn’t fault his mom for believing parents should value their child’s safety above politics, though. The woman who had adopted him hadn’t been raised in opulent palaces, had never been subjected to the sacrifices monarchy demanded—costs that included bartering children for more power, stronger alliances, greater wealth. His birth parents had loved Nick. He entertained no doubts about their affection toward him, but they’d also eagerly embraced the custom of arranging his marriage once he’d survived infancy, as they had also negotiated marriages for his long-dead brothers and sisters. Just as both his birth parents had been promised to each other in marriage a generation earlier.
Only peasants were free to marry whomever they pleased. Royalty owed a solemn duty to wed to best fulfill the needs of the tribes.
“My debts to my doctors and the hospital aren’t enough to justify desperate measures,” his mom continued with a stiff shrug. “If I sold the house—”