Ritual Magic

beams were in place. One of the walls that had come down was load bearing, which had made Lily nervous, but the architect assured her that steel beams would do the trick. The kitchen was maybe half-done, and they’d just finished framing in the new walls. Lots of electrical and plumbing still to do before they could put up drywall, but the study would end up as the dining room. The original dining room, which adjoined the master bedroom, was slated to become a luxurious master bath plus a walk-in closet.
    The floor was finished, at least—and hadn’t that been a hassle, deciding what to use! Lily had leaned toward bamboo. Rule had been torn between the beauty of a dark-stained hardwood and the practicality of carpet, which offered better traction to a wolf’s paws. In the end, they’d gone with stained and polished concrete. It looked great, was highly customizable, and wouldn’t get scratched up by anyone’s claws.
    Lily’s brain got constipated when she thought about what all this was costing, so she tried not to. She might have signed the mortgage papers along with Rule, but he was covering the renovations, so she didn’t have to contemplate it. If he said he could afford it, he ought to know. She ought to trust him. She did, but it was a godawful amount of money, especially when added to the cost of their wedding . . . which was supposed to happen in two weeks and five days.
    “What is it?” Rule asked.
    “I . . . the wedding. Should we postpone it?”
    Rule went still. “Do you want to?”
    “I don’t know. It seems like we should, but . . . Mother won’t be able to . . . and I don’t know who’s doing what. I don’t even have the final guest list.”
    “I have all that information. I can do what needs doing, but if it hurts too much to hold the ceremony with your mother’s situation so uncertain, we will postpone it. Is that what you want?”
    “I think I should want it, but I don’t. Only there’s the trip, too. Our honeymoon trip. How late can we wait to cancel our reservations? And the plane tickets. Did we get the refundable—”
    “It doesn’t matter. We can decide about that later.”
    “Okay.” She drew a shaky breath. “Do you think Mother will want to be flower girl instead of mother of the bride?”
    “Ah,
nadia
,” he said and gathered her to him.
    She rested her hands on his chest, keeping an inch of space between them. “Don’t do this. If you do this, I’m going to—”
    “Relax?” He stroked her hair. “Behave in an un-cop-like manner? Fall asleep?”
    Fall apart, more like. Exhaustion was melting outward from her bones to her muscles to her brain, taking down what few defenses she still had. “I don’t want to stop doing the job. Without the job I’m just a daughter. Nothing good is happening with me-the-daughter. My father’s very angry.”
    “Yes, he called me.”
    “Did he yell?”
    “Not precisely. Did he yell at you?”
    “He said he would forgive me eventually, but for now he didn’t want to see or speak to me. Then he hung up.”
    Rule kept petting her. He didn’t say anything.
    “I’ve never . . . in all my life he’s never . . . I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do.”
    “He’s a good man. He’s hurting and scared and angry. He thinks you made the wrong decision, but he’s a good man. He loves you.”
    She couldn’t have hurt him so much if he didn’t. “There’s no one to hold him the way you’re holding me. He’s got Susan, I guess, and Beth when she gets here, but he’ll want to be strong for them instead of letting them be strong for him. And he’s too angry at Grandmother to let her help. He said she’d gone too far this time. What did he tell you?”
    “It was a difficult conversation. I had to tell him that Julia wishes to stay with you and me when she leaves Sam’s lair.”
    “When she . . . God. I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t thought of it at all. I just assumed she’d go home, but she doesn’t know it’s her home, does she? But that’s what she should do. As hard as it will be on my father to have her there when she doesn’t remember him, it would be worse if she wasn’t there.”
    “Hmm.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Julia says she won’t live with Edward and we can’t make her. She understands that we consider him her husband. That frightens and angers her.”
    “But he’s not going to do anything that . . . mentally she’s a kid!