By midmorning, Chris was navigating the streets of Westport with prudent impatience, past shops still busy with holiday commerce, luxury cars—stopping, parking, idling—and chic pedestrians, scarfed, coated, and hatted, strolling about in the light snow. The shopping bags, the smiles, handshakes and hugs, the jingle bells, and the music were all part of an unreachable illusion.
And for Chris to witness love and happiness on the morning after—it was a form of cruelty he had never experienced before.
He kept on, gained speed, and once the downtown shopping area was behind him, he turned into a residential neighborhood and brought the 4Runner to a crawl with a gasp of relief. "This is it, I believe."
Chris parked the car on the road in front of his aunt's house, just beyond the half-circle brick driveway, and watched Joe's eyes go wide in the window's reflection.
"That's not a house. It's an estate!" Joe bobbed his nose toward the Long Island Sound. "Wow, right on the water, too. Look!"
"Yeah, that's great," Chris said without really looking. He dragged the key from the ignition one notch at a time.
"Okay. I admit it. Even I'm a little intimidated," Joe confessed, acknowledging Chris's hesitancy and coming to terms with his own. "I mean, what do we even say? 'Good morning. We're your estranged nephews. And here are your grand-niece and grand-nephew; don't mind their wings. Oh, and this little princess here—she doesn't take up much space. Mind if we crash at your place while you cough up our colorful family history?'"
"Or how about, 'It would have been nice if you had come to your sister's funeral.'"
"No offense, Chris, why don't you let me do the talking? You can just smile and nod."
Chris gave Joe a sideways glance.
"All right, just nod, then."
Joe evaluated the mansion one last time and then opened the car door. "I feel kind of bad. We look like slobs wearing these college kids' clothes. It hardly seems appropriate considering the venue."
"Who cares?" Chris replied. "On second thought, maybe it's good that you care. You might actually fit in with the Wakefield side of the family."
With Cassie, Morgan, and Ryan tucked away in their pockets, the MacRae brothers stepped past the open gate and onto the driveway. The closer they moved to the house, the more luxurious it seemed. It had slate-gray siding with elaborate white trim around every window and door. There were white porches and balconies circulating around the house, with patio furniture covered and secured for the New England winter. For late December, it was a sight to see—powerfully dreary. The folds of gray in the sky, the surging black waves, the cracks of light breaking through the cloud cover, all highlighted by white froth as the turbulent sea crashed on the rocks below.
The view could only improve as the seasons changed. On a warm summer evening, with a storm coming in, the sunset on the horizon, this location could have easily been one of the most spectacular places to live on the East Coast.
They climbed upon the gleaming front porch, rang the doorbell, and waited for what felt like an eternity.
At long last, tentative footsteps approached. Chris and Joe exchanged one last desperate look that seemed to say, Is it too late to run screaming in the other direction?
A slight woman in her fifties wearing a trendy yoga outfit opened the door. "Can I help you?" she asked—curt and clipped—her arms crossed tight over her chest.
"Hi, my name is Joe, and this is—"
"Oh, my God!" she said, after taking a better look at them. "How could I not immediately recognize you? Christopher, right?"
Chris raised his eyebrows with nervous surprise. "That's right. You can call me Chris." He unhooked his thumb from his pants pocket and offered his hand to her.
Gretchen took Chris's hand in a tentative grip and let go quickly. "Wow, you look almost exactly like your father did all those years ago." She turned to Joe, took his hand in both of hers, and stared into the eyes that were almost identical to her own. "And Joseph. You look like your mother, with the dark hair and the blue eyes."
Joe shrugged and flashed his teeth in a grin worthy of a politician. "You look more like our mother than I ever will."
This was true. Gretchen was a little taller and skinnier than their mother had been, but she had similar features.
"So what brings you boys to Connecticut? It's obviously not the weather." Gretchen pulled the two halves of her zip-up sweatshirt over her stomach and shivered in response to a gust of wind.
"Sorry to drop in on you like this, Aunt Gretchen—" Joe began.
"Please, just call me Gretchen."
"Okay, Gretchen. We were wondering if you had a few minutes to clue us in on some miscellaneous family details. Our parents didn't talk much about their past, and now we're . . . curious," Joe said, commendably revealing neither too much nor too little.
Gretchen opened the door a little wider. "Sure, come on in. I was about to make myself a soy breakfast smoothie. I know. That doesn't sound at all appealing. I could make some coffee, if you'd like."
Joe looked to his brother for confirmation, which Chris supplied with a slight upward head bob.
"That would be great. Thanks," Joe replied.
They followed her through the double doors, went past another set of double doors, and emerged into the main foyer. Natural light flooded in through the tall, narrow windows. The ceilings were multi-tiered, two or three stories high, and the staircase in the center of the hall seemed the perfect spot for making a dramatic entrance.
As they headed to the nearest doorway, Gretchen secured her loose hair into a messy knot with an elastic. The sight of her neck reminded Chris of his fairy mark—the four black dots in the shape of a diamond—and he didn't notice anything like that on her.
Is she human or. . . ?
The kitchen was spacious, modern, and sparkly clean, like something out of a home magazine. Chris and Joe took a seat in the breakfast nook while Gretchen prepped the coffeemaker and began pulling containers out of the pantry and refrigerator. "My housekeeper made her famous granola yesterday. It's fantastic. There's fruit salad and yogurt as well."
Gretchen brought the food over and set down a pint-sized pink concoction, presumably her smoothie, at the head of the table.
Chris pretended to nibble at the granola, and while Gretchen went back to the counter, he slipped a few pieces into his sweatshirt's front pocket. The twins were inside it, moving around a little too much despite his request that they remain calm and still until further notice. He had to set his crossed arms on the table so the twins would remain undetected. But after a few attempts to angle himself away from direct view, he decided their motion was still too bouncy.
The T-shirt he had on underneath resembled something he would have worn lounging on the couch in his former life. With cuts and bruises, his bare arms weren't presentable, either. Still, he removed the sweatshirt and draped it over the back of his chair. The twins were near the floor and were out of sight unless Gretchen happened to peek under the table. Chris just hoped they would stay where they were, but once he accepted the likelihood that they wouldn't, his pulse began throbbing against his temples to a point he could see it and hear it.
"Did you two have a nice Christmas?" Gretchen asked as she took her seat.
Joe smirked and bit back a laugh. "Mine was interesting, to say the least. How about yours, Chris?"
Chris was not amused and gave Joe a look to let him know. Then he lied through his teeth. "It was all right. And yours?"
"Christmas was quiet without my girls around. They're in the French Alps with their father."
Chris could tell by the way she said "father" that there was a divorce or a separation involved.
"We have two cousins, right?" Joe asked.
"Yes, I have two daughters. Victoria is eighteen and Anne Marie is sixteen. Don't you have children, Chris?"
"Yeah, Morgan and Ryan. They're twins and four years old."
"Your mother always mentioned them in the emails she sent me. Gushed about them is more like it. You didn't want to bring them along? I love kids."
"They're home with their . . . mother," Chris said, accidently letting a note of misery slip out.
Gretchen peered at him with confusion that bordered on suspicion. Then her eyes dropped to his scabbed wrist and zoomed in on his ring-free finger.
Joe, thankfully, disrupted the surge in tension when he cleared his throat. "How are your parents—our grandparents—doing?"
After one last wary glance at Chris, her attention returned to Joe. "My mother lives in her own little world, and my father just recently passed."
"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that," Joe said, and Chris forced himself to nod in agreement.
"No need to be sorry. He led a full life. He was ninety-one years old and tough as nails until the bitter end. He never would have admitted this, but once he heard your mother had died, he seemed to lose the will to live."
Joe's eyes lit up when the conversation took a desirable turn. "Why is that? I thought he and our mother hadn't spoken since before our parents' wedding?"
"That's true. He never intended to speak to your mother again. But if Skylar had made the first move, once the dust had settled, he probably would have forgiven her. And when she died, the hope of reconciliation must have died with her."
"I don't understand. What did she do that was so unforgivable?"
Gretchen laughed, dryly. It was a loaded question, a fact that did not elude her, or anyone. "Father adored Skylar. He wanted only the best for her and had plans that did not include her marrying some mysterious fisherman with no connections, no savings, and no ambition to flaunt. When she came to announce her intentions, my father threatened to disown her. She didn't seem to care. That was the last time they ever spoke. The last time any of us ever saw or heard from her," Gretchen went on. "Neither Father nor anyone else among our family and friends could figure out why she made the choice she did. We had to assume she was pregnant. Why else would she marry. . . ?"
"Some nobody?" Chris chimed in, not caring if he came off as rude. He found Gretchen's implication insulting. Chris had done the math before; his mother had been pregnant when she eloped with his father, and he was that baby.
Gretchen glared at Chris suspiciously once again. "What I was going to say was 'so quickly,'" she corrected loftily.
"Sorry," Chris mumbled, even though he wasn't. "But for the record, you were right. Here I am . . . the reason."
After an uncomfortable silence, Gretchen got out of her chair with an abrasive screech. "Coffee. I forgot about the coffee. How do you take it?"
"One cream, one sugar," Joe said.
"Black," Chris said simultaneously.
When Gretchen returned, she handed a delicate china cup and the matching saucer across the table to Joe and clunked Chris's down in front of him. The coffee sloshed over the edge, onto the saucer, and dripped next to the tablecloth's pink flowers. The oblong mark stood out like a dash of blood on a white bandage.
Even the thought of blood made Chris woozy. Blood had flowed so freely over the past few days—out of his wife's throat, down his wrist, out of that fat Gray Coat's bloated abdomen. All of a sudden, Chris's greasy breakfast from a few hours earlier made his stomach flip from testy to uproarious. He forced a few slow, deep breaths to subdue the nausea.
It's just coffee. Try to relax.
Chris closed his eyes and reached for his wedding band with his shaky hand. It was gone. It had been for days. He kept forgetting. And at that moment, he vowed never to reach for his ghost of a ring ever again.
His eyes startled open when Joe nudged him with his foot underneath the table. Joe gave him a what-is-your-problem look, and then Chris's eyes met up with Gretchen's. Her eyebrows were high, too. Chris looked back to Joe and hoped his brother could recognize the cry for help.
"How did our parents meet anyway?" Joe asked a good question with even better timing. "It seems unlikely she would just show up in Gloucester one day and meet a handsome stranger."
Gretchen cradled her tiny coffee cup in her hand. "That's pretty much how it happened. Skylar was teaching at the time and took her seventh-grade biology class on a field trip there. Apparently, one of her students went missing. The one who found the missing girl was, of course, Scott. They never told you that story?"
"They probably did, but like most teenage boys, we tuned them out when they started reminiscing. But now that they're both gone. . ."
"I've been meaning to ask you about that. Have you heard anything from your father lately?"
"No, and that's one of the reasons we're here," Joe said. "We want to find him and hoped you might be able to tell us something we don't already know."
"I barely knew him," Gretchen claimed. "His existence was a surprise and then your mother was out of our lives. She reached out to me only in the last few years. She mentioned your father had left, but she was pretty vague about the details. I was going through my own divorce at the time, so. . ."
"Do you still have any of those emails?" Joe asked. "Even something minor could help us."
"I think so. I don't usually erase anything personal. I'll see if I can print them out for you."
"That would be great! Thanks, Gretchen. We knew we could count on you," Joe said with a wink.
Gretchen emitted a quick giggle, her eyes rolling fondly at her new favorite nephew. "I'll be right back."
Once Gretchen was out of sight, Joe smacked Chris in the back of the head.
"Ow! What'd I do now?" was Chris's response to that.
"Could you act any more dark and suspicious? Honestly!" Joe threw his hands in the air.
"I can't help it. The woman hates me. I can already tell."
"I wonder why, jackass!"
Chris just shrugged. What he wanted more than anything else right now was to be alone.
Joe crouched his head into his shoulders, raised his eyebrows, and put his hands back up in the air, this time in surrender. "All right. I get it."
"I don't think you do," Chris replied solemnly.
"Yes, I do. Can you at least try a little harder to act like nothing is wrong? If Gretchen senses something's off, she might not—"
"Fine!" Chris interrupted, not needing or wanting a lecture on how to behave. "What do you think so far anyway?"
"I think she has human written all over her. I hope these emails pan out, or this trip is a dead end."
"I agree about the human thing. Hey, let Cassie out. I have a question."
Joe leaned over in his chair and peeked out the doorway. With Gretchen out of visual range, he pulled Cassie from his pocket.
Chris rested his head on his folded arms so he could see and hear her better. "Cassie, the marks on the neck . . . do all fairies have them?"
"Fairies in Pyxis either have wings or they have a mark, but not both, as far as I'm aware. The fairy marks vary in pattern depending on your ancestry." She swept her long hair off her neck and turned around. "Look, I even have one."
Chris glanced at her mark. It was a star shape, but it wasn't the same as the sigil he'd seen tattooed on the Gray Coats. Her star was symmetrical, much more elaborate, and with its shading and intricate patterning, it looked better than any tattoo or mark he had ever seen.
"Did you get a chance to see if Gretchen has a mark?" Joe asked him.
Chris removed his head from his arms and leaned back in his chair. "I checked her neck when she was pulling her hair back. I don't think there was anything there, but it all happened so fast."
"Assuming Mom was human because her sister most likely is, you do know what this could mean, right, Chris?"
"No, but I'm sure you'll enlighten me."
"Your kids. Get them out for a second."
Chris set Morgan and Ryan on the table and checked their necks. "They have wings and the mark, our mark. The diamond. Strange, right? Now reason through it with me. Say Mom was human and Dad has the diamond mark. That's why you and I have it, too. And that would make the diamond dominant, genetically speaking. Now, if Alana was human, then where would the kids have gotten the wings? Assuming what Cassie told us is true, their type of fairy was considered 'legendary' before we showed up in Pyxis. And the wing trait was inherited along with our mark, possibly making the children truly one of a kind. Back to our mother—if she was this weird type of fairy, wouldn't we also have wings?"
"So Alana is—was—a fairy? Is that what you're saying? I mean, what would the odds be? Alana and I, both of us fairies without knowing it, and her type so rare that they practically don't exist, and we just so happened to marry each other?"
"I know it sounds a little far-fetched, but it's the simplest explanation."
"And perhaps the notion isn't as far-fetched as you might think," Cassie added. "Even when fairies don't know they're fairies, the enchantment can be something intrinsic."
"You have to admit, Chris, we could be on to something. And geographically it makes. . ." Joe's voice tapered off to a whisper and he didn't get a chance to finish.
Chris and Joe quickly stashed Cassie and the twins back in their pockets as Gretchen reentered the room. She sat back in her chair and placed a few sheets of paper on the table. "So, your mother mainly talked about her progress and setbacks with radiation and chemotherapy . . . and her grandchildren," Gretchen said, skimming the emails. "But, oh, wait! Here she mentioned your father in an email, sent about three years ago:
"'Scott has been gone for over a year now. I know I don't talk about him much, but I need to get this off my chest. When he left, he said he had to take care of some business in regard to his past. He never said how long it would take. I suppose I should have asked, right? He wanted me to go to Hawaii with him. I chose to stay behind. I figured he would be back in a month or so. I wish he would call, write, or give me some indication he is even alive. He doesn't even know I'm sick. Don't get me wrong. Chris and Alana have been wonderful. They have moved into my house with their new babies, and they take turns helping me with my doctor's appointments. But they cannot replace him and I'm starting to feel like my days are numbered. . . .'"
Gretchen stopped there and looked up. "I'm sorry. I know this can't be easy to hear. I think this is the only time she mentions him. But here." She handed Joe the printouts. "You can look them over when you're ready."
Joe quickly wiped his eyes dry with his thumb and forefinger. Then his rare show of emotion was over. "Thanks."
Chris was not tearing up. He was staring into space instead, something he did when he was trying to avoid boiling over with anger.
"Well," Gretchen said, "Are you boys headed back to Massachusetts tonight?"
"No, we're traveling around right now—a male-bonding road trip. We haven't decided what our next destination will be," Joe lied convincingly enough.
"If you want, you could spend the night here so you can get a fresh start in the morning," Gretchen offered. "We do have decades of catching up to do."
Chris shrugged and Joe said, "Are you sure? We don't want to impose. You've helped us so much already."
"Don't be silly," Gretchen said with a dismissive wave. "Here, I'll show you the rooms you can have."
Their aunt led them from the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the second floor. They followed her around a corner and down a bright hallway. It was decorated with nautical artifacts, photographs, and oil paintings. She opened the last two doors. Chris took the closer of the two rooms. Joe went inside the one at the end of the hall.
Once Gretchen left them alone to settle in, Chris closed the door and let his kids fly out of his pocket. He collapsed on the bed soon after. Indoor plumbing, heat, hot water, bedsheets, and a few minutes of television would be much appreciated comforts for the night.
He covered his head with his arms to block out the excess light. And even with his kids flitting and floating about, he fell almost instantly to sleep.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
❤️ How did beautiful and wealthy Skylar Wakefield end up with the notorious fairy outcast, Scott MacRae?
Their steamy love affair is presented in Disgrace, a prequel, now complete. ❤️