I tiptoed up to the door to our bedroom. Quentin and Amber were in there with Beep. Quentin held her much the same way Reyes had, like a crystal football in danger of cracking should he hold her too tight, while Amber taught him how to give her a bottle, an expert after only a day.
I longed to breast-feed Beep, but I was out for so long after the whole well incident that they’d had no choice but to bottle-feed her. I didn’t know if she’d take me now, but I wanted to try. Not, like, right at that moment. Quentin might get embarrassed. But soon.
I watched Amber as she interacted with my beautiful daughter. She had a particular sheen about her. Her hair shimmered in the morning sun filtering in through the curtains. Her skin sparkled. Then I realized she still had some glitter on her face from the wedding. But she was so pretty. A wingless fairy, tall and strong with delicate features and an all-knowing sense of the world. Then again, she was a teen. They did know everything. The thing about Amber, however, was that she approached her worldly knowledge with respect.
Spiritualist, I thought as I looked at her. It seemed appropriate. Important, even. Her deep connection to all things around her, all things in nature, gave her a sense of the bigger picture.
She giggled when Quentin let the bottle drop too low. “Up,” she said, pointing skyward. He obeyed immediately, his blue eyes sparkling as bright as the smile he flashed her.
“What?” Amber asked Beep as though the little rascal had spoken to her. She giggled again. “I think so, too,” she told her. “His is bright and clear as a summer day.”
Wondering what she was talking about, Quentin shrugged at her.
She signed to him. “She said your aura is nice.”
He raised his brows and nodded, not believing her for a minute. I, on the other hand, was beginning to wonder. Maybe Amber really was a fairy.
She looked down at Beep again and nodded. “Okay. Okay, I promise. It would only upset her anyway.”
“Upset?” Quentin said with his voice, deep and soft as it was. “Who?”
Amber pressed her lips together seeming to regret something that was about to happen. “Charley,” she said.
Quentin knew I was standing there. He could see my light. He gave me a sideways glance, then went back to his duties. He also knew Mo was standing by them, waving to Beep, touching her face. Mo glanced up at me, her hands clasped at her chest in adoration.
I gave her a wink, then left them alone, my curiosity burning. Amber had a powerful connection with every living thing around her, but to have a conversation with a newborn? That was novel.
I felt a coolness waft over me and turned to see that Sister Maureen, or just Mo, as she insisted on being called, had followed me out.
“Thank you,” she said, using a gesture of tipping a hat. She pointed to the bedroom. “She is beautiful.”
“I agree,” I whispered. “My contact at the Vatican sent a report to the higher-ups there. They will be looking into your and your sister’s deaths as well as the priest’s, naturally.”
She thanked me again. “You told them? My sister tried to save me?”
“I told them everything, Mo.” I walked to her, a deep sorrow for what she went through tightening my chest. “You can cross through me.”
She lowered her head. “I— I don’t think he wants me.”
“Mo, of course he does. If he didn’t, trust me, you’d be elsewhere.”
“You don’t understand. I sinned beyond redemption.”
“Who hasn’t? You should have been at my house Halloween night my senior year of college. You ain’t got nothing on a French maid with a Jason Voorhees mask. That’s what forgiveness is all about, and I have a feeling God will understand. We all get lost, sweetheart. He knows. I promise.”
She gave in at last and took a hesitant step forward, then another, and another until her face brightened. I could tell she saw someone, most likely a family member. She looked at me one last time, her expression full of gratitude, then stepped through.
She’d seen her father gunned down in Chicago. The memory had the weight and force of a freight train behind it. It knocked the air from my lungs as I watched a gunman roar up the street in a classic Ford. He stuck his head out the window, his arms full of the automatic weapon he carried, a tommy gun, and showered bullets down on the pedestrians.
Sadly, he was after one man, a mob boss from a rival family. But Mo’s father, a baker carrying a fifty-pound sack of flour, had been gunned down in the process. He didn’t even know what hit him. He had the sack on a shoulder, holding it steady with one hand, and Mo’s hand in the other. They were looking at the Christmas-themed pastries he’d made in the window. Santa. Christmas trees. Stars. All brightly colored and begging to be eaten. By her and her sister, of course, who was home with a fever.
One of her father’s best customers was a man named Crichton, a crime boss, though she didn’t know it at the time. The shooter wanted him, but the rival family had also wanted to make a statement, to kill anyone they could on the boss’s turf.
Mo jumped when the gun went off, and she watched as the man, seeing her shocked expression, aimed the gun right at her. But the sack had fallen off her father’s shoulder. He’d been shot in the head, and the sack took the two shots that were meant for her head.
The car sped off, leaving the agonizing screams of the survivors in its wake. Mo stood there in a cloud of flour with a death grip on her father’s hand. But the angle of his grip was wrong. She turned and saw that he was lying facedown in a pool of his own blood.