Page 19 of The Midwinter Mirror
“Zayne,” her mum says, and I pause again. “Tell her it doesn’t matter. Tell her she’s our daughter and always will be.”
I nod.
I grab our coats and head out of the house. At least it’s not snowing, and I can follow her footsteps around the house and across the lawn. I spot her huddled on a bench overlookingthe ornamental lake, staring out over the flat, grey water. She’s shivering.
I head toward her slowly, trying to work out how to be “nice.” I mean, it’s not something I’ve ever worried about before. Or aspired to.
It’s strange. I put Holly out of my mind when I left here. I just wanted to forget about this place. Or not so much wanted—I needed to forget. And yeah, I was feeling a little as though Holly had betrayed me.
She found me that day, unconscious in the snow. Not far from Silvergate, where my dad was found crouched over the body of my mother. Blood in the snow.
Holly must have seen something. Whatever she said. Something that would have cleared my dad. Because I will never believe he killed my mother. Never. They had a volatile relationship; hell, my dad had a volatile relationship with everyone. But he loved her. And he couldn’t go on without her…
So he left me and Tansy.
Bitter? Me? Fuck, yes.
But despite her betrayal, my feelings for Holly are still there. Beneath the bitterness. I suspect they always will be however this plays out.
But that’s something to worry about later because I can feel that tug of urgency. We need to find Tansy and the other children. Right now, I have no clue where they’ve gone and no idea how to get them back. I can’t help but think that Holly has some part to play in this. I’m not sure what, but her denial that magic even exists is holding us back. We need to break through that.
Her arms are wrapped around herself, and she’s shivering. I walk up without saying anything and hand her coat to her. She shrugs into it and sits back down, then looks up at me. Her face is blotchy from crying, and her lips tremble.
“I don’t know who I am,” she says.
“Of course you know who you are. This doesn’t change anything.”
It’s weird. I remember saying something similar to Amber not that long ago. I see echoes between the two of them all the time. Maybe that’s why I’d been drawn to Amber. She was the first person I allowed myself to get close to after I left here.
“My foster sister Amber, she lost her memory,” I say to Holly. “And she used to say that: 'I don’t know who I am' thing. All pathetic and woebegone.”
Her eyes narrow at that, and I continue, “I’ll tell you the same thing I told her—it doesn’t fucking matter what happened in the past. It doesn’t matter where you came from. You know who you are, what you are. You get to choose.”
She blinks at me a couple of times while she processes that. “Did your sister ever remember?”
“Hell yeah. And let me tell you, she was better off not knowing—but that’s a story for another day. Come on, Holly, how bad is it?”
“But my mum and dad aren’t my mum and dad.”
“Maybe not biologically, but does it matter? They still love you.”
She sits there, nibbling on her lower lip as she thinks it through. “I wonder what happened to their little girl—Laura,” she says. “How sad. How tragic for them.”
“I’m guessing there was a really good reason why it happened, though.”
But what? Why?
“Maybe you’re the daughter of a mafia prince,” I suggest. “And they needed to keep you safe from their enemies.” I don’t think that at all, actually, but it sounds interesting, and Holly had a thing for reading romances about people like that.
Her lips tip up in a small smile, and some of the tension goes out of me. She’s accepting it. Thinking it through.
She frowns. “You know, in some ways, it makes a lot of sense. I’ve always felt that I don’t fit in here—in Elderfell, I mean, but also—I’m really so different from Mum and Dad. And this explains why.” She looks at me. “Do you think I’ll ever know where I came from?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But as I said, it doesn’t really matter. You get to choose who you are.”
“I guess so. It’s weird, isn’t it, that we were just in that shepherd’s hut and that was where I was found?”
“Yeah, weird. But strange things tend to happen in Elderfell.”
