Valentine Shepherd sat cross-legged on her son’s squat bed, gritting her teeth as she watched Simon dig through a pile of brightly colored books with cardboard pages and huge fonts. The kids’ room sported an abundance of short bookcases, but still they had too many books to fit, the excess strewn across the floor as miniature mountains of knowledge. Like father, like son.
“Just pick one, Simon.”
He kept rooting. Val took a deep breath and tried to control her annoyance. It was already an hour past the twin’s usual bedtime, as they’d insisted on “helping” her bake a batch of gingersnaps for the holiday cookie exchange between her group of playdate moms—well, mostly nannies—the following day. As she juggled cookie trays, they decided to have a raw egg fight in the living room. She’d ordered them upstairs, then cleaned up the slimy mess. Toby, their Jack Russell terrier, helped by licking egg yolks off the walls. Then he puked them up onto the carpet. At that point, she’d smelled the cookies burning.
“Just pick one, Simon.”
After a minute he snatched up a book he liked, sprinted back to Val, and dropped it into her lap.
Val read the cover. “The Night Before Christmas. Appropriate enough.”
Simon launched himself onto the bed and snuggled up to his mother. He beamed up at her, beautiful hazel eyes with starbursts of emerald green at their centers radiating the pure love of a devoted four-year-old. Val’s irritation ebbed, her love for her children an aloe that always soothed her most frayed nerves. She ruffled his blond hair and kissed his head.
“Lydia, come on,” Val called out.
A moment later her daughter wandered into the room, head down and eyes glued to a tablet computer.
“Turn that off. It’s time for a story, then bed.”
Lydia looked up and pushed black hair out of her big gray eyes. “But Mommy,” she whined. She turned the tablet toward Val. Flashing stars danced across the screen; some kind of numbers game. “I almost have the high score.”
“That’s great, honey. Turn it off.”
Lydia’s delicate pink lips curled into a pout, then she pressed the power button until the screen went black. She dropped it on top of a book pile and curled up next to Val, opposite her brother.
“Okay.” God, finally.“The Night Before Christmas, here we go…” Val flipped to the first page. “‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house—’”
“How does Santa get down the chimney?” Simon asked.
“It’s a trade secret.”
“Santa’s not real,” Lydia told Simon in her usual serious tone.
“Lydia!” Val frowned at her daughter.
Simon’s lips trembled and he looked at his mother with big doe eyes.
“Of course Santa’s real,” she said to Simon. “In a way. He lives in our hearts.” She smiled at her son, and his wounded innocence turned to confusion. It was good enough. “Okay, so where were we…” She cleared her throat and tried to read with the practiced animation Max was so good at when he usually did this. Her exhaustion made it a hard sell. “‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even—’”
“When’s Daddy coming home?” Lydia asked.
“In two days.”
Simon: “Where is he?”
“Fort Lauderdale. That’s in Florida, America’s flaccid wang.” Val cracked a smile. They wouldn’t know what that meant for years. There was no shame in enjoying a dirty inside joke with herself. Reminded her that she technically still belonged to the adult world despite being consumed by the daily grind of four-year-old affairs. She took her small pleasures wherever she could get them.
Lydia and Simon peered around their mother and at each other. Their eyes widened and misted over with a glaze Val recognized, the one that sent a cold chill racing up her spine.
Simon said, “Daddy was in Florida—”
“But he’s not there now,” Lydia finished.
Val swallowed hard. She wished they wouldn’t do this. More than wished—she prayed to God they wouldn’t do this. She’d hoped the twins had escaped the curse that afflicted her and Max, but since their verbal skills had exploded over the last six months, it was becoming clearer by the day they hadn’t. They knew things they shouldn’t, and they didn’t need to be in a trance to see it, like Max and Val—they were Alphas, like Cassandra, the woman in white she’d seen only in her visions. Other parents expressed amazement at how advanced Lydia and Simon were, sometimes through teeth clenched together in jealousy at their own child’s implied inferiority.
But what made them special made them vulnerable. They would be coming for her children. Maybe someday soon. Sten Ander, her sometimes enemy/sometimes ally, had told her they called themselves Northwalk. They owned Cassandra, and they wanted Simon and Lydia as well. She would burn down the world before she let her children be stolen from her.
Val began again, her throat suddenly dry and sapped of the meager enthusiasm she’d worked to channel a minute ago. “‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house—’”
“Daddy reads it better,” Simon said.
“Well, Daddy’s not here, so do you want me to read the story or not?”
Simon nodded, resigned to his fate of a subpar book reading. A long sigh escaped Val’s chest. She flipped through the book and cringed at the walls of text. Ten pages of this? She didn’t remember the poem being so long.
“‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…’ Except Santa was there! He spread gifts everywhere for all the good little boys and girls, and when he left, he said, ‘Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!’” Val snapped the book shut.
Lydia frowned. “That’s not what it said.”
“That’s the abridged version. And since when do you know how to read?”
“I’ve always known how to read.”
“Jesus Christ,” Val muttered to herself. To Lydia: “Don’t tell anyone else that.” She clapped her hands. “Time for bed. Chop, chop.”
Lydia scrambled off Simon’s bed and slipped into her own, kitty-cornered to Simon’s in the same room. Val tucked them in with hugs and kisses.
“I love you, my beautiful babies,” she said as she held Simon’s tiny body against hers, then Lydia’s. “Love, love, love you.”
“We love you, too, Mommy,” Simon said as Val walked to the doorway. “And Nana.”
She froze. “Who?”
“Nana,” Lydia answered. “She’s the best grandma ever.”
They didn’t have a Nana…Well, technically they did, but she might as well be dead. Val hadn’t seen or heard from her mother in almost thirty years—until recently, that was. To choose not to have contact with your own children for decades, even after one of them took her own life…she was certainly not the best Nana ever. The kids must be referring to someone else. Maybe one of their friends’ grandmothers. That must be it.
Val flipped off the light, a constellation of blue stars from a nightlight making slow circles across the ceiling as she shut the door. It was nothing. She didn’t want to see her mother again anyway. She couldn’t even remember what the woman looked like. All she could recall was red hair like Val’s—probably gray now—and the acrid odor of the menthol cigarettes her mother liked to smoke. And her mom’s eyes, the same steely blue as Val’s, that crinkled at the edges every time she laughed. And her mom’s voice, shrill and frantic as she screamed about the injustice of the Gulf War. And she remembered the feel of cold hardwood on her knees as she knelt at the foot of her bed, praying for her mother to return. What kind of person abandons their own children? How could she—
Val leaned against the hallway’s wall and blinked back tears. She was working herself up over nothing. Who knew what the twins really saw? They didn’t know themselves half the time—a blessing for their poor four-year-old minds. Her own children would grow up with a loving mother and father, and that was all that mattered.
Nana wasn’t real. Her mother was dead to her. Or might as well have been.
Val pushed herself off the wall in the hallway, took a deep breath, and fought the urge to walk straight to her bedroom and read the letter again. No, she wouldn’t let it distract her. She had more important things to do, good-mother things. Instead she made her nightly round through the condo: first the kitchen, then the indoor pool and surrounding patio, then the living room, the study, the den, each bathroom, and ending at the guest room—checking all the guns she’d hidden out of the children’s reach but within her own. For when they came. She and Max had enjoyed a crazy-conspiracy dry spell since the twins had been born, but it couldn’t last forever. With all the effort Max and Val’s tormentors had put into bringing the two of them together, it was only a matter of time until they resurfaced to resume their torture. This time, she’d be prepared.
Rounds completed, she considered watching some TV, maybe the Real Housewives of Something, to numb her mind. But if she stumbled on a news report involving Delilah Barrister, Seattle’s ex-mayor and Washington State’s newest Congresswoman, she was already pissed enough she might punch the television. It’d taken a massive amount of willpower to resist going after the woman who’d murdered Val’s fiancé and manipulated Val into killing Delilah’s husband, the late, terrible Norman Barrister, in order to fuel her political ambitions and assist Northwalk in forcing Val and Max together to create their special children. But Val had left Delilah alone to rule Seattle and climb the political ladder, because her family’s lives depended on it. Delilah had proven she was capable of killing anyone to get what she wanted. The fate of poor Zach, the teenaged hacker who’d helped Val almost nail Delilah and had “committed suicide” for his trouble, still gave her nightmares. She wouldn’t put her family in danger of a similar situation, even if it meant backing off her enemy—for now. Delilah would get hers someday. Val fucking swore it.
Yep, no TV tonight. She went to the laundry room and collected warm clothes from the dryer, carried the load to her bedroom, and dumped it on the mattress. She stared at the pile for a moment. Goddamn laundry. There were many techniques a person could use to fold a four-year-old’s underwear, though she’d been told by another stay-at-home mom only one was correct. If she didn’t fold the clothes now, they’d wrinkle, and she’d get disapproving looks from the other mothers in her kids’ play group. What a tragedy. Her hands balled into and out of fists. Dammit. Of all the ways she could be torturing herself at that moment, she could think of at least one better than laundry. Turning her back on the pile, she made a beeline to her nightstand, yanked open the drawer, and took out a worn envelope.
Val stared hard at the letter gripped between her fingers, an unassuming piece of mail holding only one piece of paper and sliced open along the top. It was just a rectangle of white with her address scrawled on the front in loopy cursive, ordinary to anyone but Val. What normal person sent personal letters via snail mail these days? Her eyes traced the path of those handwritten letters and cut between her name in the center and the sender’s in the corner—Danielle Shepherd.
She’d read the short letter dozens of times. Sorry I haven’t kept in touch, it’s a long story, I’d love to tell you all about it, can I come visit? Could her long-lost mother come visit? Was she serious? Silence for over thirty years and now she wanted to reconnect? Did Danielle’s sudden interest in Val’s life have something to do with her new, rich husband? Or the conspiracy that surrounded their lives, lurking out of sight, haunting her dreams and her visions, waiting for the right moment to close in on them? Be nice if she could get a second opinion from someone else, a real friend maybe, but the last one she had took off after Val imploded a few years ago. She hadn’t connected with any of the other rich, stuck-up moms and their nannies in her kids’ play group, and they weren’t interested in connecting with her. She and Max were tabloid fodder with a salacious history, after all, though they’d kept a fairly low profile since the Lucien Christophe nightmare five years ago. Maybe she should put out a personal ad: Looking for a no-frills, down-to-earth, big-hearted bestie with a bohemian streak who likes to watch bad movies, solve mysteries, and can keep a secret. Yeah, right. There was no replacing Stacey.
Val would never let a stranger into their home, because that’s what Danielle was…but the twins had seen her, knew her—
Val froze when she realized someone was standing right behind her.