“Ah.”

“I—even before that. The attack on the mall. I heard you were hurt. I sent a card.”

“I got it. Kept it right up until Gold Morning. You didn’t leave a return address.”

He smiled. “Carol would have hounded me. I needed away.”

“Because of Aunt Jess?” I asked. “Fleur?”

“It was a good excuse.” He tied off the sutures and put everything down, before reaching for sticky bandages. “How much do you know about the old days?”

“War stories, victories, lessons from defeat.”

“That sounds like your mother.”

“Yep. War stories are more my dad’s thing, I think.”

“I remember… being a kid,” he said. “My sisters—your mother, your aunt, they disappeared. I don’t remember specifics. They were young but I was still very small. Kidnapped. Did she tell you?”

“A little bit.”

“The kidnappers wanted ransom and our parents weren’t equipped to pay. We looked better off than we were. They kept Carol and Sarah for weeks. The cops called one sunny afternoon to say that the pair of them had escaped. They came back to us with powers.”

“Yeah. More or less what I heard.”

“They came back haunted, and our parents weren’t equipped to deal with it. So they sent us all off to a kind of boarding school with an attached summer camp. Nature, airy classrooms, small class sizes, horses—your Aunt Sarah loved—”

He paused.

“Probably still loves horses,” I said, thinking of the Valkyrie-created Aunt Sarah.

“I resented them for it, you know,” he said. “Because two of our parents’ three children had an issue, all three of us were sent away. Our family does that a lot, I think.”

I was all patched up, at least at my side, but I didn’t want to exit the conversation. “Does what?”

“Overreaches when it comes to closing doors or making judgments. Your mother closed off her heart, you know. As if she was so guarded against the idea of showing mercy to the evildoers that she couldn’t afford any for family.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s mercy, exactly.”

“Maybe not. But I always worried about you girls. I hoped Mark had a handle on it.”

He hadn’t. Not really.

“Our parents did the exaggerated defensive maneuver when they sent us away. They never really took us back. Because that’s something else we’re bad at.”

I nodded.

“A few years of them sending us messages saying we could come for Christmas if we wanted. So I would come and Sarah would as well, but your mother wanted to study. Or Sarah and your mother would go and I’d be busy. Then… they kind of ceased to be family.”

“Because they had me and Crystal as young as they were.”

“I never got the impression that was a big thing,” my uncle said. “They were… perfunctory in their grandparent duties. There were grudges and frustrations that felt like they weighed heavier on the family. Speaking for myself, I did resent being sent away for my teenage years, made to spend time with problem children. My parents never did apologize.”