“The pill?” Lina repeated, staring across the table at her. “Why? Why do you need to go on the pill?”

Katie lifted her eyes from her phone. “So I don’t get pregnant.”

Lina rubbed her forehead, not mentally prepared to have this conversation with Katie at 6:45 on a Tuesday morning, but at the same time knowing she couldn’t put it off. The last thing she needed was Katie pregnant. “I will make you an appointment at the gynecologist, but that doesn’t mean I’m telling you it’s okay to have sex. In fact, I think it’s the opposite of okay. You’re only sixteen years old. That’s not old enough to—”

“You were fifteen.”

Lina felt a rush of heat in her face. “Why would you think that?”

“Grandma told me.”

Chapter 37

37

“You told my sixteen-year-old daughter I had sex when I was fifteen? What were you thinking?” Lina rushed out as soon as her mother answered her cell phone.

“Oh, relax, Lina. It’s not like I made it up. It’s true.”

“She didn’t need to know! Now she probably thinks it’s okay to have sex.”

“It is okay to have sex. It’s natural.”

Lina covered her eyes with her hand and mentally counted to ten. Her mother was impossible. “Please don’t tell her anything else about my childhood without clearing it with me first.”

“She asked me to get her birth control pills, so instead of taking her myself, which I knew you would frown upon, I encouraged her to talk to you. When she claimed you were too conservative, the subject of your own sexuality came up. It was a natural progression. And my advice to you is not to fight this. If a teenager decides they want to have sex, there is no stopping them.”

“How could you possible know that? You never tried to stop us.”

“That’s because I knew it would be a wasted effort. Just take her to the gynecologist and let nature takes its course.”

Lina combed her free hand back through her hair. This was insane. “Who is she planning to have sex with? She doesn’t even have a boyfriend.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure that’s true,” Alice said. “She asked me what to do with the components used in a spell once the spell had worked.”

“Worked,” Lina repeated. She dropped down into a chair. It was the boy with the tattoos.

“Don’t judge him without knowing him,” Nick told her later that night. “Tattoos and a lack of college ambitions aren’t enough to discourage a relationship. Katie is a smart girl.”

“But sixteen seems too young to have sex.”