"Mostly," I said, compromising.
"It helps that he's dead." It was humiliating that my chest was getting tight.
I'd given myself all the self-pity time I would allow.
Mom could cuddle her children like any of the best of parents, but I should have trusted her more.
She knew all about the importance of standing on your own two feet.
Her right hand was balled into a white-knuckled fist, but when she spoke, her voice was brisk.
"All right," she said, as if we'd covered everything she was going to ask.
I knew better, but I also knew it would be later and private.
She turned her angelic blue eyes on Adam.
"Who are you, and what are you doing in my daughter's house at eleven at night?" "I'm not sixteen," I said in a voice even I could tell was sulky.
"I can even have a man stay all night if I want to." Mom and Adam both ignored me.
Adam had remained in position against my bedroom door frame, his body held a little more casually than usual.
I thought he was trying to give my mother the impression that he was at home here: someone who had authority to keep her out of my room.
He lifted an eyebrow and showed not even a touch of the panic I'd heard in his voice earlier.
"I'm Adam Hauptman, I live on the other side of her back fence." She scowled at him.
"The Alpha? The divorced man with the teenage daughter?" He gave her one of his sudden smiles, and I knew my mom had made yet another conquest: she's pretty cute when she scowls, and Adam didn't know many people gutsy enough to scowl at him.
I had a sudden revelation.
I'd been making a tactical error for the past few years if I'd really wanted him to quit flirting with me.
I should have smiled and smirked and batted my eyelashes at him.
Obviously, a woman snarling at him was something he enjoyed.
He was too busy looking at my mom's scowl to see mine.
"That's right, ma'am." Adam quit leaning against the door and took a couple of steps into the room.
"Good to meet you at last, Margi.
Mercy speaks of you often." I didn't know what my mother would have said to that, doubtless something polite.
But with a popping sound like eggs cracking on a cement floor, something appeared between Mom and Adam, a foot or so above the carpet.
It was a human-sized something, black and crunchy.
It dropped to the floor, reeking of char, old blood, and rotten corpses.
I stared at it for too long, my eyes failing to find a pattern that agreed with what my nose told me.
Even knowing that only a few things could just appear in my living room without using the door couldn't make me acknowledge what it was.
It was the green shirt, torn and stained, with the hindquarters of a familiar Great Dane still visible, that forced me to admit that this black and shrunken thing was Stefan.