Addison looked up at her parents.

Kaden offered her a hand, and she took it. She found it pleasantly strong and callused, the knobs of his knuckles not unlike Addison’s own.

Chapter 45

Kaden

Though Kaden stood surrounded by overgrown, shadow-dark ferns, he only had eyes for Addison. For his daughter. He couldn’t believe that after everything he’d lost, he wasn’t alone anymore.

He had a family.

He was a father.

He held open his arms. “Can I… can I hug you?”

Irene pressed a hand to his upper back, and he couldn’t hold back his tears. Yes, his mother stood just on the other side of the leaves. She could still take it all away. She would take it all away from him. But not before Kaden let himself feel what it was like, just for a moment, to have a daughter.

He wouldn’t waste this opportunity, even if he ended up losing it forever.

At Addison’s tearful laugh, something in Kaden’s heart crumbled. He’d built so many walls, so many ways to protect himself from his own trauma. How could one young woman’s smile send them all tumbling down?

She stepped into his embrace.

He held a hand over the back of her head, her hair soft and dark and his.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“None of this is your fault,” she murmured into his chest.

He wanted this to last forever, to never let her go.

When he pulled back, he found her tears matched his own. He reached a hand forward, and when she nodded, he brushed them from her face.

“Is it too soon to say I love you?” he asked as Irene wrapped an arm around his waist.

Addison shook her head and bit her lip. “But it might be too soon for me to start calling you Dad.”

He laughed with an ache right in the center of his chest. He wanted to say there’d be time for that, that they’d figure it out, but he couldn’t make that sort of promise. Not now, not with what his mother could do. Maybe the best he could wish for was that she’d let them keep at least some of this newfound hope.

Chapter 46

Addison

Addison had always wondered what it might feel like to look into her father’s eyes. Now that she stood face-to-face with him, she found it was everything she’d hoped it would be and more.

Her eyes were his eyes.

Her smile was his smile.

But her magic was her mother’s—or was it?

Addison crouched low. She pressed a hand into the soil. “All right,” she whispered to the plants. “I think I understand.”