He’d protected me, and of an instinct I didn’t know I had, I did what I could to protect him.

We’d both nearly died last night, and the last thing I knew before showering and hitting the sack was that he was out with his friends hunting a fucking werewolf.

But before he came home, he found my purse.

He found my purse.

Something I hadn’t noticed, even if I couldn’t believe for an instant I didn’t, came clear in that moment. It was so enormous, I dropped the towel and stumbled to the armchair, leaning a hand heavily into it, taking my weight in my arm, holding myself up, my eyes never leaving my purse.

It was gone.

“Holy shitoly, it’s gone,” I whispered.

I’d lived with it since I could remember. “It” being what my mother was convinced made me nuts. It convinced her enough to make me go see psychologists, three of them, all of them declaring I was attention seeking and, due to that, had an eating disorder and needed long-term psychological care and medication.

I was of a healthy weight. I didn’t starve myself, didn’t binge, didn’t purge. I also was a good kid. I could be sassy. I could get in trouble, but nothing bad.

I just constantly felt “it,” but didn’t know what “it” was.

When Mom tried to force therapy and drugs on me when I was eleven, Dad stepped in, doing the impossible—an antisocial, antiestablishment biker winning custody of his daughter.

It took him four years and three appeals, but he did it. And while he was doing it, he’d managed to put up court-ordered obstructions to Mom medicating me (but, alas, I was forced into therapy; however, this was an hour a week I didn’t have to put up with my mother, and my therapist was an all right guy, so it didn’t scar me).

“That hunger inside you, little girl, you’ll quench it,” he’d told me when I’d shared it with him. The gnawing pain, the desperation to get it gone, the lifelong struggle to learn to live day to day with it, like someone with a chronic illness learning how to cope and live life even though the debilitating symptoms never went away. “You’ll know it when you find it and I know my Lilah. You’ll get it, fight for it, earn it, beg for it, but in the end, you’ll win it and you’ll be whole.”

Dad had been wrong.

I hadn’t known it when I found it.

Looking at my purse, I knew.

The pain was gone.

I’d found it.

My God, I’d found it.

Moving from the chair to the table, I snatched up my purse, digging inside even as I aimed my ass to a chair and collapsed into it.