Page 14 of What did you do?

“I bet Mother had Chef make pistachio ice cream for you,” Eli chirped.

I quickly steeled myself and smiled as we continued up the dirt path.

When I was seven, shortly before my eighth birthday, I had watched an ice cream commercial where averyhappy family dug into bowls of pistachio ice cream. They smiled and laughed, each full of the deepest love I had ever seen. The father laughed and teased the kids.

I knew immediately that I was no longer a vanilla girl.

No, pistachio was my new flavor.

It didn’t matter that I’d never so much astasteda pistachio. I wanted what they had, that love and closeness. I craved everything they had in that commercial—even the ice cream.

That week was the same week that held the day, the hour, theminutethat would be forever etched into the darkening recesses of my mind.

That was the week my mom and sister had been killed in the car accident.

The same week Saracen stayed with me and brought Miss Claire to watch over me.

I remember quite distinctly how numb I had been.

A lot of things changed for me that week.

I didn’t want Saracen and Miss Claire near me.

I wanted Mom and Adrianna back. I should have been in that car accident too. It felt like my punishment was that I hadn’t been allowed to go with them.

Itwasa punishment—and a terribly painful one.

To this day, I’ve never wished for anything more than that I’d died in that car with my family.

But no. So it was up to me to make the best use of my time here.

After I had stumbled upon the Seelie queen in her tiny form and protected her from the blackbird, a few things had happened. I’d learned that fae in the human realm who spent too much of their magic would shrink until they could return to their realm. I had learned that the blackbird was actually the Unseelie Queen Tenebris in a different form. And I’d seen the golden queen often, as she’d visited and left her son frequently while she tended to business, leaving me to play with him.

Queen Saracen had been the one to relay the news of their death.

I remembered the way she struggled to get the words out of her pink lips when she showed up at my door.

She and Eli had stayed with me for weeks to make certain that I was safe and wouldn’t be shipped away to some foster family I didn’t know.

Mom didn’t have any friends that I knew of, and there was no family left besides me. My grandparents had long since passed, and my father wasn’t a part of our lives. I had no one. Mom was always a little anxious and paranoid about the people in our lives.

A short time later, Eli had gifted me the tiny, vined pendant to keep her ashes in. He had snuck it in from Seelie and had even had it engraved. Amongst the delicate white-gold vines that held the ashes, a tiny oval citrine sparkled on a small hinge, and when you unlocked the hinge, it revealed an inscription that had been etched unto the vial:

FEUHN—KAI—GREEYTH

Eli told me it was an old fae language and that it meant “eternal love and friendship.” It’s something we said to each other all the time now. It must be a really old language because even other fae like Miss Claire had no idea what it meant. Thatmade me like it even more—something else special just between us.

Saracen tried to be kind and tender. But she was the queen of a fae realm that humans were forbidden from entering. Eventually she and Eli had to return to rule their kingdom (well, not Eli, he was close to my age, an infant by fae standards, though the aging of fae was unbelievably incomprehensible for me). In her place, she had left a nursemaid, Miss Claire, to take on my care between her very scattered visits to the human realm.

That week, the modestly sized freezer of my small house had been packed with tubs of every flavor of ice cream imaginable, the tiny freezer threatening not to close if even one more pint were to be added. Apparently word had gotten around our small town about the accident, and everyone assumed ice cream would be exactly what a newly orphaned child needed.

I didn’t want to drown in ice cream, I just wanted to drown someone.

I had a really hard time controlling my anger back then.

One day, on a particularly hard afternoon, I opened the freezer and found pistachio was among the many pints. At that point, I was willing to try anything that could help me grip hold of even a tendril of comfort.

Flashes of the commercial played in my head, and I knew it would give me that same, sought-after experience.

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