“I would have come,” I fretted into Trevor’s armpit. “I would’ve helped her if she asked.”

“She seemed to think,” said Trevor slowly, “you couldn’t handle it. She used to say, You know, I’ve never met anyone so in terror of — um. Lemme just think how she put it.”

I sat there rigid against Trevor, waiting to hear what it was I was so in terror of.

“Oh, just . . . being needed, I guess.”

That was when I gave in and cried against Trevor. I could feel his warm body relax and soften against mine as I did. After a moment or two, he turned his head and, with a firm, grandmotherly smack, kissed me on the temple.

“Ah, Karie,” he said. “You and I are just two lonely people.”

I sat with that. With the you and I of it.

“Just like the song says, eh?” And then he turned his head again to croon into my ear, quavering and tuneless.

“Where dooooo we all belong?”

The Enchanted Coach

23

I woke to sunshine streaming through my curtains and checked the time on the cracked face of my phone. It was ten in the morning. I lay back, stunned but grateful Kelli had permitted me to sleep in so late. Not only that, but she hadn’t gotten up the night before.

As for me, I was hungover and wrung out, but as I sat up I realized that I was feeling good — better than I had since Irene’s death. Unburdened. Like a curse had been removed.

And the whole house smelled of bacon.

It turned out Trevor had been up since eight and had already cleaned the dishes from last night, made Kelli breakfast, and was now methodically pouring her tea out of one mug and into another to cool it enough for her to comfortably gulp down. A maneuver I recognized as being straight out of Irene Petrie’s Big Book of Kelli-Care. He winked at me as I sat down. “Rough night, Mother?”

As good as everything smelled, I was in no condition to face the mess of eggs Trevor had produced, but I nibbled some bacon and admonished him for going to so much trouble. Trevor — who I realized had been waiting for me to eat — sat down and scarfed up the eggs himself while I sat across from him, blowing on my own mug of tea. Kelli was still in her pyjamas and had finished eating long ago, but she didn’t seem to want to leave the table. I knew why. Because it was comfortable, all three of us together like this. And I knew, for Kelli, it was also familiar — breakfast with Trebie. When I had told Trevor at around one in the morning that he was welcome to sleep in the spare room downstairs, he got to his feet, went to the linen closet without having to be told where it was, and shooed me off to my room, insisting he would make the bed himself — as it was clear he had done many times before.