“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you had to go through that and so sorry you felt you couldn’t talk to me about it before. I love you and think you are the bravest young woman I have ever met.”
He kissed the top of my head, and then I was hugging him too. Hugging and sobbing in a way I hadn’t done since I was a little girl. And he let me, settling down on the nearest barstool and pulling me onto his lap, where he rocked me back and forth. He didn’t try to interrupt, didn’t try to reason with me. He just held me like I was a child, soothing me while I cried out all the pain and grief and confusion that had haunted me for the last year.
“My poor girl,” he murmured as I sobbed. “My poor little girl.”
When I finally wound down, he reached behind him and ripped some paper towels off the roll. Then handed them to me with the order to “Blow.”
I did, a couple of times, before wiping the salty residue of tears from my cheeks. Then, embarrassed to have behaved like such a baby, I slid off his lap and dumped the paper towels in the trash can at the end of the island.
I couldn’t look him in the eye, not now that he knew the truth about me. I felt exposed, raw, ashamed, as I waited for the other shoe to drop.
But it never came. Instead, my dad nudged my cup of hot chocolate toward me and said, “Drink it. The warmth will do you good.”
I did, but then it was my turn to be tension filled, my turn to brace for a blow. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I demanded, “Aren’t you going to say something? Anything?”
“Not until you look at me.”
It was a command, for all that it was voiced softly, and my gaze shot up to his.
“That’s better.” He smiled faintly, but it faded quickly, replaced by a look of such intense determination and anger and love that I sucked a breath in, held it. “Tempest, I think you are one of the bravest, most incredible people I have ever met in my life. That you would even think to go up against that heinous, evil bitch to save your mother—after only weeks in the ocean—both terrifies me and makes me so incredibly proud. You have nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to feel responsible for—”
“You don’t understand! I made the wrong decision; I got her killed—”
“Cecily got herself killed, Tempest. She chose that way of life, chose to be mermaid even when it demanded impossible things from her. She could have walked away. Hell, she did walk away for ten years. But in the end …”
“She missed the ocean.”
“She missed the power.” He drained his own cup of hot chocolate before placing it carefully on the counter where he played with it for impossibly long, tense seconds. “I loved your mother, more than I ever thought it possible to love a woman. But that doesn’t mean I was blind to her faults. I knew she loved me, but she loved what she could do as mermaid more, loved the power that came with her heritage. I knew, very early on, that I only had her on loan. That eventually the lure of that power, the lure of who she used to be, would take her from me. From us.”
“And you married her anyway?” I didn’t understand. “You had kids with her knowing she would abandon us?”
“Yes.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Hope springs eternal. And besides, would you have me wish you out of existence? Or Rio? Or Moku?”
“No. Of course not.” I couldn’t imagine a world without my brothers in it. Wouldn’t want to imagine it.
“I made some mistakes along the way, Tempest, as did your mother. But you and your brothers were never one of them. Your mother died how she lived—fighting Tiamat, high on power, determined to be the one to end her so that—”
“So that I wouldn’t have to.” The truth came to me then, harsh and unrelenting. “She fought Tiamat so hard and for so long so that I would never have to fulfill my part of the prophecy.”
“What prophecy?”
I shook my head, unwilling to get into the ancient prophecy that had predicted my upcoming showdown with Tiamat. “It’s not important.”
At first I thought he was going to push, but in the end, he just shook his head. “She was your mother and she loved you. It was her job to protect you. Don’t take away her sacrifice by making her death all about you.”
His words made sense even as they conflicted with the suffocating sense of guilt I had lived under for so long. I didn’t know if I could believe them, but I would at least think about them. Especially when he seemed right on about my mother’s need for power.
For a second, the memory of her killing a merfamily rose up, taunted me. But I shoved it back down, deep inside myself. That was somewhere I couldn’t go, not tonight and maybe not ever.
I stood up, carried our dirty cups to the sink. It was after three thirty in the morning and I should be exhausted. Instead, I felt wired, like I’d had a few too many double espressos. My skin itched, and it was taking all the concentration I had to keep from twitching.
“You tired?” my dad asked, eyeing me carefully as I rinsed out the cups and loaded them in the dishwasher.
“Not really. I mean, I know I should be, but a lot has gone on tonight and I think I need some time to process it all.”
“Did something happen with Mark?” he asked, with his usual insight.
I thought of the belly chain wrapped around my waist, of all the things Mark and I had—and hadn’t—said earlier. “I love him, Dad.”
“I know.”
“I want it to work between us.”
He nodded. “So make it work.”
“I don’t know how to. I mean, not for the long term.”
My dad seemed to startle a little at that. “Do you have to?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re not even eighteen years old, Tempest, and Mark barely is. Don’t you think you should cut yourselves some slack? If things were normal—”
“You mean, if I were normal.”
“If that’s what I’d meant, that’s what I would have said.” The look he shot me warned me to keep my mouth shut until he was finished. “If things were normal, you’d be applying to colleges right now, waiting to see where you were accepted. There are no guarantees that you and Mark would end up at the same university anyway. This isn’t much different than that—at least for now.”
“You mean except for the fact that I grow a tail and live at the bottom of the ocean. It’s not like Mark can exactly visit for the weekend.”
“Even more reason to take your time, to see where this goes. A lot of things can change in four years.”
I eyed him suspiciously. “Is this the guy who lived through a human-mermaid relationship talking or just my dad?”
He grinned. “Maybe a little of both?”
“That’s what I figured.”
Part of me knew he was right, that I had had some of the same thoughts up in my bedroom earlier that evening. Especially when my own future was so insecure—who knew if I’d even be around in six months to try to work on a relationship with Mark. I was determined to bring Tiamat down the next time we went against each other, no matter what. If I had to die to do it, then I was willing to pay that price. Worrying about what would or wouldn’t happen between Mark and me in a nebulous future that might not even exist was neither reasonable nor logical.