Ed had changed a lot while Cooper wasn’t looking. To be fair, Cooper had purposefully and determinedly spent many years not looking. He didn’t know the soft, slow-moving man with a hint of ice cream in his gray mustache and half a dozen Ping-Pong balls glued to his T-shirt to represent butterfly eggs—the stage of the metamorphosis cycle Cayla had assigned him for their themed family costume. It was an unheard of display of playfulness. When Cooper was a kid, his mother already dying, Ed had sent him and his brother out in whatever they could find in the house and use without destroying. More than one year Dean had thrown a sheet they weren’t allowed to cut holes in over Cooper and left him to stumble around the neighborhood alone while Dean hung out with friends.

Now, Ed handed him a small cup of melting ice cream. “They didn’t have your favorite.”

Cooper blinked at the unexpected offering and tried to remember ever having a favorite flavor. He supposed he must have as a little boy. It was strange what you remembered and what you didn’t. Stranger still the things your parents held on to as critically important information, and what they let fall away as bygones, ghosts of the past.

“Too bad your Oliver couldn’t make it,” Ed said for possibly the eleventh time that hour.

“Dad,” Cooper sighed. “I told you he’s out of town. Maybe if you’d called ahead like a normal person instead of banging down the—”

Ed held up his hands in the universal I don’t want to fight but I’m also about to say something that’s going to piss you off gesture. “Did I say that? I just think it’d be nice for your family to get to know him before the big day.”

“Oh my god,” Cooper muttered under his breath, and shoved a spoon of melty vanilla ice cream into his mouth. Truthfully, he was grateful Park was currently visiting his own family’s estate. He should not have to be subjected to this forced bonding experience that Cooper was beginning to suspect hadn’t been Cayla’s idea at all.

Ed’s attitude toward Park was difficult to figure out. When they’d first met in the midst of a murder case last year, Ed had liked Park a lot. The revelation that he and Cooper were dating was equally positive and honestly went a long way toward soothing some age-old tensions between Cooper and his father.

The revelation that Park was a werewolf, that werewolves were indeed a thing at all, had been...a bit more challenging.