Page 225 of Ex Somnis

“I…” Nevan’s voice cracks. “Just like that?”

“Just like that, but I have one condition.”

“Anything.” It comes out of him instantly. “Whatever it is. Anything.”

“I want Jasper to have the cottage.”

“Me?” The tarot cards almost slip out of Jasper’s hands.

“It should be yours.” Mabel’s eyes find Jasper with a grin. “Somebody who knows what to do with all those crystals and the incense in there.”

Jasper opens his mouth, and nothing comes out, which is a first.

“Yes,” Nevan breathes out. “Of course, he can have it.” He turns to look at Paul. “I have my own home.”

Paul’s eyes turn a little misty at that, and God, mine sting in return.

“And,” Mabel goes on, turning back to Nevan. “I want you to lease the restaurant to Lennon and Tessa. For whatever the two of them decide it should be.”

Nevan huffs a wet laugh and scrubs a hand down his face. “That was the plan all along.”

“Whatever you want it to be.”

“With whoever you want.”

“As long as you’re here.”

Nevan signs the paper with another watery laugh.

Tessa is crying. Jasper is crying. Nora was already crying. Derek looks like he might start. Ridge is grinning at all of us like a man who has decided to be smug about other people’s happiness, and Paul is watching me in the way he does, to see if I’m okay, and I am.

I’m so far past okay that there isn’t a word for it.

I go back to the kitchen, then bring out the food, and we eat at the long table with Mr. Muffin facing the party and the snow coming down outside. My whole strange, impossible family, loud, full, and here.

Once we’ve sung happy birthday twice and the cake is eaten, Nevan whispers to me, “I want to go tell my mom about the inn.”

I nod and stand. “I’ll come with you.”

The hospital is twenty minutes out, and the roads are bad, but we go anyway in Paul’s Mercedes, because it’s way safer than my Bumble Bitch in these conditions.

Seraphine is in a long-term room Nora Vaughn is paying for out of gratitude, with a window that faces the tree line.

Her silver hair is braided. There’s a feeding line and a monitor counting out a heartbeat, while the moonstone still rests in the hollow of her throat where it belongs, where it’s always belonged.

She looks peaceful. She looks, honestly, more peaceful than I ever saw her when she was awake.

Nevan pulls a chair up close and takes her hand before he starts to talk. He tells her about the inn. About the paperwork, the signature, how Mabel patted his cheek. He tells her it’s his now, and his voice wobbles on it.

He comes here a lot, probably more than he tells anyone, even me. I think there’s a part of him that still feels guilty about being asked to promise to stay away from his mother by a man he didn’t understand, and keeping that promise without knowing he was keeping it, while she sat in a chair and looked through him.

I have to look at the window for a minute, because the thing I think every time I’m in this room is that my mother died a few months ago. There is no chair, no window, no hand to hold. There’s a shoebox of cards and a recipe I can’t make come out right. If I could have her like this, even like this, even gone but warm, even somewhere I could only talk to and never reach, I would be here every single day. I would never leave.

So I never tell Nevan he comes too often.

I told him something else, instead. When I was elsewhere, I could hear them. All of them.

And now he believes—he needs to believe, and so do I, so I let him—that she can hear him. That somewhere under all of this, in the place she finally got to stay, Seraphine is listening to her son tell her about owning the inn he always wanted.