Page 129 of It Must Be Fate

“Are they…” I swallow. “Are they alive?”

“They’re alive,” Rhys croaks. “They’re okay.”

Thayer and I fall into each other’s arms in relief at the news. They’realive, everything is going to be alright.

In retrospect, I should have asked if they were unharmed.

Rhys’s answer to that question would have been incredibly more measured.

It would have been more indicative of what was to come.

When I see my son again, I instantly know things will never be the same. He’d told Peter back at the house that he wasn’t a boy, but hewas.

He wasmyboy.

And now he’s gone.

In his place stands a twelve-year-old with dead eyes and a void where his heart used to be. Not quite a man yet, but definitely no longer a boy. The flat wasteland of his gaze as he stares back at me reminds me so much of his father’s the day I met him that it stops me in my tracks.

The shock makes the breath dry up in my lungs.

The kind, innocent boy is gone.

I lost him that day and I would never get him back.

Peter took that from me, from all of us.

Rhodes was near despondent when questioned, refusing to utter a word about his ordeal or give a clue as to how he was feeling.

He was marble; cold and beautiful and impossible to penetrate.

The only time he expressed any emotion in the immediate aftermath of his rescue was when he saw Ivy.

And that was perhaps the greatest shock of all.

Where reverence and adoration had previously shone in his gaze every time he laid eyes on her, he’d snapped out of his near comatose state on first glance at her and his tongue had swung in her direction, wielded like the sharpest of swords cutting through the softest of targets.

“Get thefuckaway from me,” he’d hissed, jerking to his feet and getting in her face. She’d cowered back against the wall, her gaze pinned dutifully downwards, her entire body trembling and submissive. “I never want to see you again. I never want to hear your name or listen to your voice or smell your perfume. I fuckinghateyou.”

He’d loomed over her, fists clenched and nostrils flared as the vitriol spewed unendingly from his lips. And she’d taken it, crying softly but not saying a word in rebuttal or defense of herself.

At first frozen in horror, the four parents had then leapt into action, separating them. Even as he was being dragged away, Rhodes continued screaming at her and Ivy kept crying. We stood, stunned, torn between stupefaction at this sudden emotionality from him and staggered at the depth of his anger and its chosen target.

Neither one of them would talk about what happened during those three days, no matter how many times we asked over the coming weeks and months. We tried waiting for the dust to settle and reintroducing them once some time had passed, but the results were always the same. Rhodes was cruel and Ivy took it without looking at him.

We might have gotten our children back alive, but they hadn’t emerged unscathed. Far from it.

They’d both changed.

Whatever happened during those three days destroyed them both in their own way.

Life couldn’t continue as before.

After months of navigating a new normal that didn’t feel normal at all, Rogue and I made the difficult decision to leave London.

We needed a fresh start. An opportunity for Rhodes to start over, away from the trauma, away from the constant trigger that was Ivy, somewhere that was a clean slate.

We took our family back to Chicago, to be closer to my mom. Being with their grandmother helped my kids and my family as a whole, but being away from my friends was incredibly hard. It was the right decision, but I was homesick in a way I’d never been before, and although the girls and I spoke every day and tried to FaceTime each other often, it wasn’t the same.

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