Chapter 70 Family Secrets
Grace had not noticed that anything was wrong.
That was the thing Molly kept coming back to as she sat in the desk chair with her teddy and watched her friend stare into the distance with the expression of someone working through a problem that had too many variables. Grace was perceptive, it was something Molly knew about her.
She had always known it, the way Grace picked up on things that other people missed and filed them away quietly without making a show of it. But she was also, right now, carrying enough of her own problems that the additional awkwardness in the room wasn't registering. She was too deep inside her own thoughts to feel Molly's.
Which was, Molly told herself, exactly what she needed.
"They didn't get it yet," Molly said, and the words came out with a casualness she had to construct carefully, testing each one before she released it. "The face. Ryan said they're still working on getting it finalized before they release anything officially."
She lifted one shoulder in a small shrug that was meant to communicate mild disappointment rather than the thing she was actually feeling, which was the complicated guilt of someone lying to protect a plan they hadn't fully formed yet. "So we don't know anything more than we did last night."
Grace's expression shifted. The hoping-without-admitting-to-hoping quality that had been sitting in her face since Molly had come back upstairs folded itself into something flatter, the particular look of someone filing a disappointment away rather than letting it show fully.
"Oh," Grace said. Then, after a moment, "Okay. That's—I mean, that's fine. These things take time." She gave a tight-lipped smile.
"Hey." Molly leaned forward slightly, abandoning the teddy on the floor. "Don't look like that."
"I'm not looking like anything."
"You're doing the thing where your face goes very neutral and that actually means you're disappointed."
Grace looked at her. "I don't do a thing."
"You absolutely do a thing." Molly sat back and let a beat pass, and in that beat, she made a decision. Not the decision about Maddox as that one was still sitting in her chest, she hadn't figured out how to handle it yet. But this was a smaller decision, a directional one.
Because, a Grace who was sitting still with nothing to pursue was a Grace who might, eventually, start asking the right questions at the wrong time.
"Actually," Molly said, and let the word come out like something that had just occurred to her, casual and slightly wondering. "Can I ask you something random?"
Grace raised an eyebrow. "When has anything you've said to me recently been random?"
"Fair point. Okay, so it's not totally random." Molly tucked one leg under her. "Maddox."
The name landed differently in the room than it had in her own head. She watched Grace's face respond to it. It was a quickly controlled small movement.
"Have you actually thought about finding him?"
Molly said it simply, directly, watching Grace's face. "Not just in the vague way where it's somewhere on the list of things you need to eventually deal with. I mean actually sitting down and making a plan to locate him and talk to him."
Grace opened her mouth and then closed it again, which was its own kind of answer.
"Because," Molly continued, keeping her voice even and reasonable, "you said Enzo won't tell you anything useful about what actually happened to Matteo. You said he shuts down every time it gets close to that." She paused. "But Maddox was there. Maddox knows what happened, whatever the actual truth of it is. And if anyone's going to tell you the real story, it's him." She spread her hands slightly. "Right?"
Grace was quiet for a moment, and Molly could see her working through it, the wheels turning in her head.
"That's… yeah," Grace said slowly. "That's actually not a terrible point." She frowned slightly, "And he might be able to help me with my birth parents. He knows things, I’m sure Maddox does."
"So find him," Molly said simply.
"Molly, I don't have any idea where he is." Grace gestured vaguely at the window, at the general outside world. "If I knew how to find him I would have already started."
Molly nodded slowly, as if this were a practical obstacle to be solved rather than the end of the conversation. "Okay," she said. "Let me think about that." She stood up from the desk chair and stretched. "I'm going to get snacks. My brain works better with snacks. Do you want anything specific or should I just bring whatever exists downstairs?"
"Whatever exists is fine," Grace said, already returning to the distance, to the reconfigured version of her thoughts that now had Maddox at the centre of them rather than the composite face she didn't know she'd already seen.
Molly went out.
The kitchen was quiet, the room holding the smell of toast and something faintly floral from whatever her mother used on the counters. The overhead light was off and the room was running on the grey daylight coming through the window above the sink, which made everything look slightly softer than it actually was.
Her mother was standing at the counter with her back to the door, and she didn't turn around when Molly came in. She was looking at something in front of her that Molly couldn't see from the doorway, and the set of her shoulders had the particular contained quality of someone who had made a decision about something and was waiting for the right moment to act on it.
Molly went to the cupboard and started looking for biscuits.
She found them on the second shelf and was reaching for the packet when she heard the tap. Her mother had turned the tap on, a thin steady stream of water running into the empty sink, its sound filling the space of the quiet kitchen.
She turned with biscuits in hand.
Her mother was facing her now. Her expression was not angry, not exactly. It was the expression of a woman who had arrived somewhere past surprise and was operating from a place of determined calm.
"I heard you upstairs," she said. Her voice was low, pitched below the sound of the running water, and Molly understood immediately that the tap was not an accident. The tap was some sort of cover. "Just now. The conversation."
Molly felt the biscuit packet in her hand become something she was gripping rather than holding. "Mum—"
"Don't." Her mother's voice was quiet but absolute in the way that her quiet had always been more final than her loud. "Don't tell me you don't know who he is. That girl upstairs knows Maddox Barker, and you know her, and you knew." She held Molly's gaze steadily. "Start talking."
Molly set the biscuits down on the counter. She looked at her mother's face, really looked at it, at the grief that had lived there for days and had been joined overnight by something harder, something that had found a direction and was now pointed at it. Molly thought about denying it again. She thought about it for approximately three seconds.
"Yes," she said quietly. "I know him. Grace knows him better, he was her best friend growing up." She watched her mother's jaw tighten and pressed forward before the interruption could come. "She doesn't know, Mum. She doesn't know it was him. I only found out this morning and I haven't told her."
Her mother was quiet for a moment. The water ran steadily between them.
"Why not?" she asked finally.
Molly looked at the counter. "Because she'll protect him. That's just, it's just how she is with him. She'll find a reason, or she'll try to get to him before Ryan can, or she'll—" She stopped. "I don't know what she'll do. That's actually what worries me."
Her mother made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite disagreement.
"We need to find him," her mother said. “He killed your brother for God’s sake!”
Molly looked up. "I know. Ryan will—"
"Before Ryan." Her mother's voice was still low, still even, but there was something in it that had changed quality slightly, a precision that hadn't been there before, a sense of direction. "We find him ourselves."
Molly stared at her. "Mum, we can't just—"
"There's a way." Her mother turned slightly and looked at the window for a moment, at the grey daylight coming through it, then she turned back and looked at Molly with an expression that was difficult to read because it was doing too many things at once. "Molly. I know this might feel sudden, but do you believe in magic?"
The question came out of nowhere and went straight into the centre of the room, and Molly felt the air around it do something strange.
"What?" she said.
Her mother's expression didn't change. "Magic. Do you believe in it?"
Molly thought about Grace sitting upstairs telling her that werewolves were real. That witches were real. That the world contained things that ordinary life had done a very thorough job of keeping out of view.
"I'm starting to," she said slowly.
Her mother nodded, as though this were the answer she had expected and it had told her what she needed to know. She turned slightly toward the centre of the kitchen, and something about the way she repositioned herself was different from how she'd been standing before.
She stood still, the specific stillness of someone about to do something that required attention.
"There is a way to find him," her mother said. "To find exactly where he is. His location, specifically, not just a general area." She paused. "A locating spell. If we have something connected to him, or if we can establish a connection through someone who has a deep connection with him—" She glanced upstairs briefly, and the glance said something without needing to elaborate on it.
"What are you talking about?" Molly said, and her voice was careful now because the hairs on her arms had done something she wasn't going to acknowledge yet.
Her mother turned to fully face her. She held Molly's gaze for a moment, and then she breathed out slowly through her mouth, a long, deliberate exhale, then she raised one hand.
Her fingers moved.
That was all they did, really. They moved in the air in front of her, a slow motion like someone conducting something that couldn't be heard. Her fingers moved like she was manipulating something that had no visible form, they traced patterns through the space in front of her with the ease of a practiced habit. Like someone who had done this thousands of times in private and was now doing it for the first time in front of an audience.
The kitchen light suddenly came on.
Then off.
Then back on as her mother lowered her hand.
The silence in the kitchen was total.
Molly stood with her back against the cupboard and looked at her mother with her mouth open and every prepared response she'd been running through her head for the last ten seconds completely gone, replaced by the single blank fact of what she had just watched happen.
"You're a magician," she said finally. The word came out small and slightly stunned.
Her mother almost smiled. Almost. There was a crease at the corner of her eyes that in a different moment would have been amusement, but the grief was still underneath everything and it kept the smile from completing itself.
"No," she said quietly. "I'm a witch, Molly." She held her daughter's eyes. "And so are you."