“Your grandmother, yes, but not your grandfather. That happened back in New York. 1945. They had your father before Robert went off to fight in 1943. He’d only been home a month when the accident happened. He came out here to start a new life, get his bearings and a place to live before he brought your father out here.” She tilts her head behind her. “That’s where I met him. On the train. He helped me when some of your people tried to rob and kill me. He was a good man.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I never met him.” A wave of sudden anger washes over me. Why did they tell me he was dead? Why keep that a secret? He was alive for the first fifteen years of my life and I never met him? He was the only surviving ancestor I had. My mom’s parents had passed away a year after I was born.

“Oh, I know that look,” Miriam says. “God, you look just like him. You’re angry. Because they didn’t tell you? Or because you’re having to find out from a stranger?”

“I’m really not sure,” I say. “More the first, I think. And wondering why.”

“Your grandfather went to fight voluntarily. Very few of your people did. They didn’t see the point. They knew they’d be safe no matter what. But your grandfather wasn’t built that way. He knew he would be perfectly safe on a battlefield, and if he hid things well enough, he might make a hell of a difference.

“He wasn’t counting on other mages fighting in the war. Did you know Eisenhower was a talent? Not a terribly gifted one, but he knew magic when he saw it, and it didn’t take long for your grandfather to get his attention.”

“This doesn’t really answer my question.”

“Young people,” she says, rolling her eyes. “So impatient. And yes it does, if you’ll mind your elders for five minutes.”

“Are you gonna call me a whippersnapper?”

She laughs. “I just might. Now shut your hole and listen. Robert was sent behind enemy lines to verify rumors that the Nazis were using magic directly in the war effort. They were. Necromantic rituals, magical experiments on people from the camps. Robert stopped them. But it scarred him.”

Necromantic rituals. I can see where this is going.

“PTSD?” I say.

“He used to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Almost killed me a time or two waking from nightmares about ghosts and armies of walking corpses.”

“So he did know me,” I say. “But he couldn’t be around me.”