Page 41 of When I Accidentally Summoned a Demon

“You barely know him.”

My spine bristles. “I know enough.”

“Do you?” Mom moves farther into the kitchen, setting her purse on one of the stools. Her fingers linger on the strap. “Vesper, I saw something at the shop.”

“I wouldn’t know since you rushed out the door without even saying goodbye.”

She pauses as I open the refrigerator to do a little lunch prep for Bethie. Cutting board? Check. Strawberries, grapes, cheese, turkey, and red peppers? Her favorite. I begin chopping them up into little pieces, segmenting them into child-size plates with the plastic covers.

“I know I saw something. It was…unnatural.” She sniffs.

Focused on the task at hand, I respond with, “You were across a crowded room like a peeping tom and judging a man you’d already decided you didn’t trust.”

Mom exhales through her nose and tightens her hold on the purse strap. “There is something very wrong about him.”

“Your granddaughter would seriously disagree,” I point out, smiling to myself when Bethie giggles and says “Pwecious” again from the other room. “And he’s been the perfect houseguest.”

“He is not just a houseguest if he’s living here,” she mutters.

“And that is the actual problem.” I slide the last pieces of red pepper into Bethie’s container and snap the lid into place. “You don’t get to regulate my dating life, Mom.”

Her eyes flare wide. “Wait. You’re dating him?”

I won’t put a label on what Valefar and I have. But it’s the closest thing. Instead, I carry the cutting board to the sink and turn on the water. “That’s not your business.”

“But Rick⁠—”

“It’s not his business either.”

My tone wasn’t angry, which almost surprises me. No raised voice, no shaking hands. No annoyance despite how my mother never fails to bring up the subject of Rick in every conversation. I simply rinse the cutting board beneath the faucet and set it into the dishwasher, while my mind processes how it would have been a screaming match a few months ago. Maybe even a few…weeks.

Before Valefar.

The tether doesn’t tighten. But it does tweak. Like a guitar string strummed, a musical vibration rippling through me, through us.

I close the dishwasher.

Something in Mom’s expression changes. Not acceptance. God forbid we achieve a miracle before lunch. But she stops pushing for now.

After pulling up her purse strap again, she smooths out her floral-print skirt while strategic eyes settle on me. “Let me take Elsbeth to the park for a couple of hours,” she says. “The one by my house. I brought the good sunscreen. You could use the morning.”

And there it is. The reason for the visit, produced at the exact moment she needs a graceful exit and a foothold. Sometimes, she’ll use those visits, those “favors” as she calls them, as ammunition. Any little outing, any little gift, can be wielded as a weapon later.

I could say no. I think about how she could spend the entire drive fishing my daughter for information, and how my daughter’s current vocabulary consists of pwetty, Pwecious, va, ba, and no.

“Two hours,” I say. “Hat and sunscreen. You can get her lunch after if you want. But not that big red slide. She’s too young. Just the blue one.”

“I have raised a child, Vesper.”

“And she came out great, so.” I set a hand on my hip.

For a second, my mother almost smiles. Then she goes to collect Bethie, who has to be pried out of the highchair, hand-washed twice, and physically carried past Valefar, at whom she waves both purple fists.

“Bye-bye, Pwecious!”

“Farewell, little beastie.”

My mother’s face does something complicated at that, and she doesn’t say goodbye to him at all.