my daughter about it at length when she came around to see me next. It was a windy day and her skirts were spinning around her ankles when she came in through the door, picking debris from her hair with her fingers.
“You can’t go around scaring people like that.” I was sitting on the champagne-colored sofa, pink ink pen in hand, editing my new book. “Whatever were you trying to accomplish?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t do anything, I just visited, that’s all. I didn’t want him to see and made no effort that he would. He just did.”
“And now he’s terrified.” I pushed my purple-rimmed glasses on top of my head.
“Well, I can’t do anything about that. I would think you’d be pleased, truth be told. At least now someone knows you were telling the truth all along.”
“It doesn’t matter what they think. I don’t care if they think I lie. I’ve been called a liar my whole life, why would it matter to me now?”
“Don’t you think he deserves to know, though? Deserves to know that his sister isn’t mad?”
I shrugged. “I can’t see how that would make any difference to Ferdinand. I hardly think he’s been lying awake at night pondering the state of my mind.”
“But still, doesn’t it make you happy to know that he knows?”
I straightened up on the sofa and put my pen down. “If Ferdinand had been a bolder man, he would have known all along. He saw Pepper-Man when he was a boy.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “Then why didn’t he say something?”
“He did—to our father. That was a great mistake.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know exactly, but it wasn’t good. He never spoke of it again, decided it wasn’t real, I suppose. Decided not to believe.”
“Oh, that man,” she scoffed, plunged down beside me on the sofa, manuscript pages flying. “Then why was he so surprised to see me, if he knew all along we were real?”
“He doesn’t want to believe, and I can’t blame him. Look at what happened to me.”
“But still, isn’t it good, Mother, to know there is someone else out there who sees?”
I sighed. “What do you want, Mara, a revolution? For the faeries to rise up and claim their existence? For the veil to come down so you too can all have nice houses and Sunday roasts?”
“I would like to be real. I would like to not be a tainted secret, something you have to hide in the mound.”
“I never took you to the mound to hide you.” I picked stray pages from the floor. “You know how that went.”
“Do I?” Her eyes were gleaming.
“Sure you do.”
“Not according to Dr. Martin. According to him, you were driven to a clinic some distance from here and went through surgery to have me removed.”
“Well, you are here, aren’t you, so obviously that didn’t happen.”
“But if it did—”
“Then it went wrong.”
“That easy?”
“Yes.”
She sat for a moment, mulling it over. “I don’t want a nice house or a Sunday roast—”
“Yes you do. You all want that. You want to live like everyone else. That is the curse of your humanity, that need to join the pack.”
“I am not human,” she argued.
“And yet you are—all of Faerie was, once.”
“Dead, then, and changed, isn’t that what you think?”
“Yet you live.”
“On the fringe, far out in the woods; just a shadow passing through your rooms.”
“What do you want, Mara? Truly?”
“For someone to pay for my life.”
“What life?” I was honestly confused.
“Just that, Mother, what life? The life I did not live at all or the life that I was given? A life soaked in your blood—”
“But you are happy, Mara, aren’t you?” I tried to touch her hair, soothe her in some way, but she brushed my hand aside.
“I will be happy when the debt is paid.”
“Oh, Mara,” I said, “I am not sure if that is the right approach—”
“What is, then? To be content with what I got, knowing no other life than this, invisible and hungry, living at the edges of people’s minds?”
“Well, it is life.”
“But is it?”
“Sure it is!”
“I am angry,” she said, “for the injustice of it all. I have paid with my life for someone else’s crime—”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Am I Pepper-Man’s daughter?” Her hard gaze turned on me again, smoldering like embers.
“I don’t know.” I struggled to meet that gaze. “You are Pepper-Man’s daughter—not Pepper-Man’s daughter. Does it matter what you are? You are.”
“Oh, Mother.” She leaned back and stretched out her legs. “You were always such a good