The horses arrived to drag her brother away exactly five minutes after Benji’s arrival up the steps. Mira stayed beside Amelia in the hallway, leaning into the woman for some form of comfort while Benji lifted Magic off the couch (it was horrifying, how easily he could do that) and walked with him down the steps. He motioned for Mira and Amelia to follow and they trailed behind silently in a solemn, single-file line like a sad group of attendees at a funeral.

December wind shot through the open front door and into the bakery, making it feel more a tundra than a home and Mira hated every second of it. Even standing outside on the front porch with nothing more than her sweatshirt, sweatpants, and slippers (she refused to change them despite her father’s insistence), the chill felt oppressive, like it could freeze everything from the inside out.

But Mira was already hardened, already steeled against the cold. There was nothing left to freeze.

Old snow sloshed beneath boots and hooves as Benji entered the horse-drawn carriage with Magic in tow and placed him on the bed inside of the little cabin. It reminded Mira a little bit like the white box that criminals were contained in back in the day when they needed to be transported between detention centers in other towns. The blue markings on the sides of the box, metallic and shiny, were a brighter cyan in the moon’s glow and the white burned her eyes to look at.

Benji spoke with the attendants in a hushed voice Mira couldn’t hear, motioning between Magic and Amelia, who was sitting on the lowest porch steps with her hands clasped together and pressed against her mouth.

All the while, Mira leaned against the porch railing and felt herself seethe with anger. Emotions conflicted with thoughts and logic, and every time rationality came to settle the score, she’d push it all away when she reminded herself of why she was so furious.

It was a blindside. A complete disregard for her thoughts on the matter.

The sound of the porch steps creaking brought Mira back into the present; Amelia shot forward off the stairs and catapulted herself into the white box alongside her son. It rocked and swayed from her momentum and for a moment, Mira thought it was going to topple over.

From her spot on the porch, she caught bits and pieces of conversation from her father and Amelia, who was poking her head out from the back of the carriage. “Are you coming?” she asked.

Benji shook his head—the gesture made Mira’s blood boil—and rested a hand against the side of the wagon. “We’ll meet you there, Mill. Let him get settled first.”

“But—”

“Let them take care of your son first. They won’t be able to do anything with all of us crowding around. His team is waiting and prepared at the clinic. We’ll be there soon.”

Mira balled her sleeves into her fists. “We should go with them, Dad,” she called, the effort it took to talk irritating to her throat. It didn’t come out as strong as she wanted it to.

Benji pursed his lips and shook his head with a condescending sigh of exasperation. Not once did he look at his daughter. “We’ll meet you,” he said. “Give yourselves time.”

Amelia just stared and Mira caught the subtle nod, the brief movement of understanding. Another thing she’d been left out of the loop for. The sudden taste of metal swept along Mira’s tongue; she hadn’t realized she’d been biting her lip and she chewed on her sweatshirt strings instead to distract herself as the carriage doors closed, the horses whinnied, and the wagon began to pull away with haste.

Once the horses were properly out of sight, Benji slumped against the wooden railing of the porch, the heels of his palms pressed into his brows, chin tipped towards the sky as if in penance. Or as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just done.

At least they both shared the latter.

“What the hell, Dad?” Mira hissed, finding it easier to speak when she wasn’t projecting her voice.

Benji slowly made his way up the steps to stand beside her. Everything about being near her father just boiled the blood in her veins more and she took one large step over to the side, sharing the railing with him, but not her space.

Mira waited for an answer, the explanation she felt owed. And yet her father merely stood there at the railing of the porch, elbows propped against it, knuckles pressed into his forehead. In the night, Benji looked older, his face wizened. There was stubble on his jawline and chin that she hadn’t noticed before and the indentations under his eyes were more apparent in the moonlight.

Realistically, she knew that the burden (though it felt wrong to refer to the situation as such) had been draining to them all. Realistically, she knew that she was not the only one who was suffering, the only one who was tired or distraught or defeated. She knew that.

But she knew her father didn’t share the blame. Didn’t share the guilt, the disappointment. The frustration she pointed at herself with such unbridled rage that it may as well have been a gun.

And that was her doing. Her fault.

Her suggestion. Her fault.

Stolen novel; please report.

“We should’ve gone with them,” she whispered through clenched teeth.

“There’s no point in us going with them, Bella,” he replied, and Mira couldn’t understand how he could speak with such a calmness in his tone. She bunched up her fingers into her sleeves, molding them into a fist. “It doesn’t help Magic to crowd the crew trying to help him.”

“So if we aren’t going with them—”

“I never said we weren’t going at all—”

“—are you going to explain to me why you didn’t tell me?”

Now Benji looked at her, the moonlight reflecting in his glasses to hide his eyes. She didn’t need those to read his tone or the scowl on his face. The confusion and disbelief was written all over the exasperated tone when he spoke. “That’s what this is about? All the huffing and puffing is because of that?”

As if the fact that he hadn’t told her anything was just part of the average Tuesday.

As if she was overreacting and making a mountain out of an anthill for no reason.

As if keeping secrets wasn’t one of the cruelest things he could have done behind her back.

Because if he could keep that from her, what else would he be willing to hide? Mira wasn’t stupid; she’d seen his eyes linger on the locked liquor box, the forbidden cabinet that only took residency inside of their house for specific pastries and as a silent reminder that Benji could best his demons even in the face of them.

In truth, she’d started checking his usual stashing spots for small liquor bottles since he came home from talking with Tammi several weeks ago. Her searches brought back nothing, but what was stopping him from finding new spots to hide from her?

The dangerous entity that supported her brawl with her peers buzzed inside her head. The grip on her sleeves grew tighter, tight enough to make her muscles shake. “What do you mean ‘that’s what this is about’? What else would it be about? You lied to me!”

“I didn’t lie to you, Bella.”

“Well, you didn’t tell me, either, Dad! Don’t you think that would’ve been good information for me to know?”

Her father took a deep breath, huffing a plume of air from his nose. He did this several times, watching the smoke cloud in front of him before he replied. “I was going to tell you. I swear on your mother’s life, I planned on telling you everything yesterday.”

“Sunday?”

“Sunday,” Benji confirmed. “You were asleep still and I ran everything by Amelia who threw the world’s biggest fit about it and it took me hours to convince her. And, stubborn as she is, Amelia isn’t as hard headed as you. If it took me that long to get her okay with the idea, I knew you weren’t going to budge. And I would rather have had you be mad at me than watch a child die on my couch.”

Without thinking, Mira swung a fist into her father’s shoulder, striking hard into a pressure point.

Benji recoiled and hissed in a breath, bringing his uninjured arm to hold onto the one she’d hit. Time stopped; Mira stood there, her fist suspended in the air just in front of her chest, all nerves singing with the need to run, climb, do something to distance herself from where she was right now. Her father stared at her in utter disbelief, evident in the hang of his jaw, the raised eyebrows. Her heart was beating so hard, she heard it in her ears. Not even her lungs could hold onto air.

She was going to be in such trouble.

At least, that was what she would have thought, had Benji not watched her with a careful, soft-eyed expression that looked so much like pity that felt so undeserved. He should have been angry with her, not … this.

Mira couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t understand the warmth. Not after everything that she alone caused.

The confusion magnified tenfold when Benji shook out his punched arm and hugged her tight.

She squeezed her eyes shut, tried to push back everything for the sake of being strong, tried to shove down the lump in her throat and the tears behind her eyes. Heavens, Mira was so tired. So fucking tired of being the strong one. The protector.

But she had to be. Who else would do the job if not her?

Benji ran his fingers through her curls before pressing his face to the top of her head. She felt like a child being coddled, but the warmth of her father’s embrace was welcome in the cold.

In the silence that followed, her father whispered two words into the dead of night. It wasn’t much, but in that moment, it was enough.

“I’m sorry.”

Mira only nodded, keeping quiet as her father went on, taking the pause as permission to go on.

“I don’t want you getting the wrong idea,” said Benji. “I wasn’t a fan of sending them to Grimmshollow either. But I know what inaction does to people and I wasn’t going to watch it happen to them.”

Mira forced herself to speak. “What do you mean?”

Her father paused, the hesitation in his words obvious. This was a sore spot, an open wound. “It was what happened to your mother.”

The words jumbled around in Mira’s head. It was rare for Benji to talk about her mother—at least while he was sober; Mira heard plenty of stories about her while he was drunk, though she was never quite sure how true those statements were. She didn’t have the confidence to interrupt him, so she allowed her father the space to reminisce and hugged him tight in silent support.

“She was supposed to be transferred to Grimmshollow from Chrome’s clinic because the technology there is just better. She deteriorated before they had the chance to send her. They kept her on support so that they could get milk for you. It was horrendous; I’d never seen a person hooked up to so many wires.

“I wasn’t in the room when she passed. I was walking around with you because you were sick and fussy. All you did was cry, so the nurses thought that the walk would be good for you.”

Mira smiled a little. “They weren’t wrong.”

Benji laughed, pressing a small kiss to the top of her head. “No, they weren’t. They were pretty on the nose about that.” He took a small step back and moved his hands to place them directly on her shoulders. “Look,” he said, “I should’ve told you. I’m sorry I didn’t. But I couldn’t sit there and watch the kid get worse knowing that something could be done.”

Something that still shouldn’t have had to be done in the first place.

Something that only happened because of her.

No matter the levity, no matter the distraction, nothing seemed to keep that thought at bay and she didn’t feel confident enough to give those words life, so Mira kept her mouth shut instead. Her gaze shot to the floor and she scuffed the wooden porch with her shoes.

“I’m gonna call Will and see if he’ll let me borrow his horse,” her father went on, near oblivious to her silence. “We can get there faster that way, but we’ll take our time with it. Sound good?”

“Yeah,” Mira murmured, feeling the exact opposite. “Sounds good.”