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And while Father never laid a hand on Hazel, he intimidated and manipulated and verbally abused her until she became a cowering little mouse in his presence, until she wouldn’t even leave the house without his express permission. The change in Hazel after Robert died was astonishing. She was a new woman, a glowing, vibrant version of the meek mother they’d known all their lives.
“Mom,” Lily said gently, leaning forward to stroke her shoulder before straightening again. “I found you crying so many times. You’d always say it wasn’t his fault, and you’d make excuses for him, but the way he spoke to you… He hurt you. And yet you always defended him, told us that love requires compromise and concessions. And I…I started thinking, that’s what love is. That it makes you just take everything, no matter how bad, without complaining. That it robs you of your will to stand up for yourself.”
She paused, looked down at her hands on the table. “It almost cost me the love of my life. I would have missed out on Alek if I hadn’t realized how twisted my perception of love was.”
Hazel made a small noise, took Lily’s hand in hers, and squeezed.
“It wasn’t right.” Basil knew his voice was hard, his anger about the past too great for him to even pretend to be diplomatic. “His behavior, the way he talked to you, shamed you in front of us—how you let him treat you like a…like a despised slave…”
“Let?” Hazel narrowed her eyes at him, eyes the exact same color as his own, seemingly the only link he had to his family in terms of appearance.
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
“Baz.” Lily kicked his shin again.
“No. I want answers.” He focused on his mom. “You know what I mean. Aunt Isabel said the same thing. You never stood up to him. You never—”
“How dare you.” Quiet, so quiet, but Hazel’s voice carried thunderous anger. “How dare you imply it was my fault. I’ll not have you speak to me like that.”
She rose, her chair screeching on the parquet.
Lily reached out, took her hand. “Mom, please. That’s not what we—of course it wasn’t your fault. He was the one being shitty toward you.” A sharp glance from Hazel had her adding, “Sorry. Wrong, his behavior was wrong. You didn’t deserve that.”
Something flickered over Hazel’s face, a shadow darkening her features for a second.
“Wait.” Basil leaned forward. “Wait. Mom—did you think you deserved his treatment?”
“Of course not.” But she looked down, to the side—a lie. She bristled at the implication that she was partly at fault for allowing Robert’s behavior, but somehow, somewhere in her heart, her mind, she did believe it…or maybe she believed she had triggered it? Believed she’d done something to make him start treating her like crap?
Lily saw it too. Her demon senses allowed her to read auras exceptionally well—something he envied her, his own perception as dull as any human’s, born without magic as he was—and whatever she read in Hazel’s energy pattern made her gasp.
“Mom…why would you feel guilty? Why would—”
“Because,” Basil interrupted her quietly, “I’m not his son.”
Hazel flinched. Lily whipped her head around, stared at him slack-jawed. True, they’d entertained the theory some years ago, but they dropped it when Hazel yelled at them for even considering it. It hadn’t come up in the years since, which explained Lily’s surprise.
Basil, however, never let it go. His looks were just so different from the rest of the family, and he didn’t really resemble Hazel’s husband, or his relatives. Black hair, creamy white skin, and blue eyes ran in the Murray family, and Lily was the perfect example, was almost the spitting image of her late Aunt Isabel. Hazel’s brown eyes were due to her own father’s, and one could argue that Basil had inherited his eye color from her.
But his blond hair had no precedent in either family. Hazel’s husband had light brown hair, and all his relatives’ hair was even darker. Basil’s skin glowed with a light tan, as if he sunbathed regularly, when both Hazel and her husband had very light skin. It made sense to Basil that he must be the product of an affair.
The fact that he and Lily were twins made the biological explanation a bit trickier, but not impossible. Basil read up on it, back when he and Lily first started joking about not sharing the same father.
A twin pair of a boy and girl was always fraternal, meaning they didn’t develop from one egg, but from two separate ones, each fertilized by a different sperm cell. And since during ovulation eggs were fertile for up to twelve hours, and since sperm was able to survive for up to seven days in the uterus and fallopian tubes, if a woman had a twin-egg ovulation, and slept with two men within the couple of days leading up to her ovulation, each of the men could father one of the twins.
Yep, Basil sure had been thorough with his research. Doubts about your parentage could do that to you.
He’d just never scrounged up the courage to outright ask his mom about it. Not until now.
“Am I right?” His voice wavered just a little bit. He swallowed. When she didn’t say anything right away, he carefully put all the apples he’d divested of their label stickers back in the crystal bowl, one by one.
His mom opened her mouth, closed it. “How can you ask me that?”
“Just tell me. Robert’s dead, so he doesn’t care anymore.”
“Basil.”
“Mom.”
