“Of course I wouldn’t!” As it happened, yelling at David wouldn’t hurt either. “What kind of person do you think I am? He’s seventeen. He’s Wild, I’m Wild, and he thinks I’m cool because, frankly, I am, but what I feel for him is irrelevant because I’m an adult and am fully able to recognize I can’t always have what I want. So do you know what I do?” David opened his mouth, but Charlie cut him off. “I’ll tell you what I do, I put on my big girl pants and I suck it up and I live my life knowing I will always have a dragon-sized, empty hole in my heart and, in the finest tradition of crappy ballads, I’ll never let it show. So don’t patronize me, you overgrown billy goat.”

“You done?”

“Yes.” The October wind had made her eyes water. She swiped at her cheeks.

“That’s not all you do.”

“What?”

“You run.”

“Fine, and I run. Hello! Wild. I don’t have to stick around, it’s in the rules.”

“Jack feels the same way.”

“As what?”

“As you do. You fill that same place in his heart.”

And now she knew how the dinosaurs had felt when their asteroid hit. “Oh, that’s just fucking wonderful,” she growled when she got her breath back.

“I tried to convince him it was the pressure of ritual.”

She could hear a dog barking off to the northeast, a siren to the south. “Why?”

“For comfort. It seemed like the logical solution; I had no idea you felt the same way until I saw the two of you together.”

“You didn’t see . . .”

“Felt,” David amended, eyes black from rim to rim.

“Right. Fine. Whatever.” Charlie knew a warning when she saw one. “I’m sure you were trying to help. You want to keep helping. Tell me how the hell am I supposed to look at him now and not see him looking back?”

“You two need to talk.”

“Talk to each other? No, we don’t.”

“He doesn’t know why you keep running away, he thinks it’s about him and . . .”

“It is about him. I know, I know,” she continued before David could respond, “he assumes he’s done something wrong or that I suddenly don’t like him.” Positions reversed, him thirty, her seventeen it was what she would’ve thought.

“So talk to him.”

Eyes narrowed, Charlie folded her arms. David had made no effort to hide the threat. “Or?”

“Or you can continue living your lives at cross purposes, trapped in a bad romance novel, until it goes beyond misunderstandings and one of you lashes out—which is likely to cause irreparable damage to the relationship you already have, the family, and very probably the city, given who and what you two are . . .”

“You make it sound like Godzilla versus Mothra,” Charlie muttered under her breath.