“You’re being a little sexist here, King,” Nora said when he was scrolling through his phone, looking for the number of the company that installed his. “I can take care of my own house.”

“You have a thousand strings of cursed Mardi Gras beads hanging from your tree left by a witch over the course of three years trying to put a spell on you,” he said as he put the phone to his ear. “Tell me again why I should let you handle this?”

Nora opened her mouth to give him five good reasons he should back off and let her handle it.

Then he said, “I’ll pay for it.”

“All right,” Nora said. “It’s all yours.”

Kingsley ordered her to his house while he stayed at hers and waited for the installers to arrive. She was halfway out the door when she heard him on the phone with a new person now, requesting a tree trimmer come and trim her front tree and remove all the beads.

“No,” Nora said to him.

“What?” He told the person on the other end of the line to hold.

“My house. My tree. My beads. You can handle the security system, fine, but leave my tree alone.”

“A witch put them on your tree.”

“You don’t actually believe in witchcraft, do you?”

That got him. “Of course not.”

“Then no reason to have them removed, right?”

Kingsley hung up on the tree trimmer.

“Thank you,” she said although she didn’t mean it. The men in her life were getting a little overprotective for her taste. “Do I need to remind you that I am not a child? This is my house. I own it. You get an opinion,” she said, “but you do not get a vote.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay. I know you’re on edge, Edge.”

He smiled a little, but just a little.

“If anything happened you to,” he began, glancing away like he was wont to do when admitting feelings he didn’t like having. “We’re all knitted together so tightly…one thread unravels, we all fall apart.”

“I know you’re scared. You always turn into a control freak when you get scared.”

“Why aren’t you scared?” It was a good question. Why wasn’t she?

“I don’t know,” she admitted with a shrug. “I met her. You didn’t. What she did scares me. What she said scares me. But she doesn’t scare me.”

“She scares me enough for the both of us. Now go.” He opened the door and pointed in the direction of his house.

“I have to run an errand first.”

“It can wait.”

“I’ll take Gmork.”

“It can wait.”

“Until when?”

“Until I stop being terrified,” he said. He met her eyes again and she saw his fear. Kingsley was right about all of them being interlaced, but wrong about how. They weren’t knitted together like a blanket or sweater. If those unraveled, they could be fixed. They were more like a spiderweb, all of them, made of filaments so fragile and fine nothing could put them back together if one of them was torn away.