shoulder straps, and the color stood out in contrast to the warm glow of her rich brown skin. Her eyes were brown, as was her hair that coiled down to her shoulders. She had gathered it back with cloisonne combs, which I remembered had been a present from Rafé.
I leaned against the counter, watching her taste the chowder.
“This is good, but a dash of lemon pepper would go a long way,” she said. “Where’s your spice cabinet?”
I pointed toward the narrow drawer at the end of the counter. I had a galley kitchen, large enough to do some decent cooking in but far from a gourmet kitchen. She found the bottle of lemon pepper and added a dash to the chowder, tasted it again, then added another shake.
“There, that’s good.” Turning around, she let out a groan. “I hope you don’t think I meant it wasn’t good to begin with—”
“No, you told me it was good. I believe you,” I said, laughing. “I’m not so vain about my cooking that I’m going to get my nose bent out of shape when you think of a way to make it better. You’re like…the Cooking Channel incarnate.”
She snorted. “Thank you. I love to cook and I’ve done a lot of it over the past couple of months. It helps me cope.”
“I’ll take these crudité platters out to the table,” my mother said, delicately stepping around me with them. I waited till she was gone.
“How are you doing? Honestly?” Angel and I shared a special bond over Rafé’s death. He had been her boyfriend, and he had been my late fiancé’s brother, the one link I had left to Ulstair, who had been killed by a serial killer over a year before. Losing Rafé forced me to realize that Ulstair was truly gone. But I had Kipa to steady me. Angel had lost her lover.
She hesitated, then tilted her head. “I’m surprisingly okay, to be honest. I keep waiting for his death to fully hit. Oh, I’ve cried, but I keep waiting to have a breakdown that never happens. At first it was hard, but…can I tell you something I haven’t even told Ember?”
“Of course.”
Angel glanced around to make sure we were alone. The party was in full swing and nobody was in the kitchen but us. “I’m sad, but I don’t feel…heartbroken. I feel like I should be, and I feel guilty that I’m not.”
I let out a slow breath. “I understand. I felt the same way after Ulstair died. I missed him, and I still do. I loved him, and I still do. But now I wonder if I was ever truly in love with him, because my heart healed far faster than I expected. While I miss the friendship we had, I don’t miss the relationship.”
“You don’t think that makes me a bad person, then?” Angel searched my face, and I realized she was looking for a way to forgive herself.
I took her hands. “Not at all. You loved Rafé, but he wasn’t your forever-person. That doesn’t mean you didn’t care about him. It doesn’t mean his death didn’t matter.”
She ducked her head, then smiled. “Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. We had a rocky road—coming from different cultures, with him being Fae and me being mostly human. And then when he went through the torture, it changed him and even after counseling, he was never fully the same. I guess he couldn’t be. He wasn’t as present, you know what I mean? I always felt like he was standing outside of himself, watching the rest of us. And it couldn’t just be the PTSD. Look at you—you went through something as bad, or worse, and you’re here. You’re not a million miles away.”
“I got counseling—” I started to say, then stopped. “When Rafé lost his brother, that’s when things first shifted. They were tight, you know. They protected each other. Something shifted back then and it just kept shifting.”
“I’m glad you understand. Everybody expects me to be brokenhearted and to cover myself in black and they tell me I’m hiding from my feelings,” she said. “Ember and Herne tiptoe around, like they’re afraid if they kiss in front of me, I’ll break down. I wish to hell they’d stop coddling me.”
“Tell them,” I said. “Ember’s your best friend. You need to be straight with her. Don’t let the resentment build up. They aren’t going to think you’re a horrible person. Not at all.” I wrapped my arm