Caroline sat at a table under a window in the room that Jean Luc had called the parlor when he’d given them the tour. Coming from money and then marrying into even more money, she’d sat in a lot of parlors in her life, but never one quite like this. There was a large, musty bear skin rug in the middle, and two enormous, red, crushed velvet chairs with what looked like animal paws for feet. Spread across the middle of the room was a sagging, upholstered couch with a pattern of foxes and hounds dancing from arm to arm. Oh yeah, and the wallpaper, which obviously used to be white but was now faded to a rather grisly tooth-colored yellow, had a pattern of vegetables lining it every few inches. Tiny vegetables, only an inch or so high. Eggplant, cabbage, lettuce, pepper, artichoke. That was the pattern. Eggplant, cabbage, lettuce, pepper, artichoke. Racing itself around the room.

She loved it. Utterly loved it. Every home she’d ever lived in had been professionally decorated and had always looked immaculate. Crisp whites and perfectly upholstered butter suede. There were the lamps that cost more than a lease on a car and vases filled with two dozen roses that were trashed the very second they began to wilt.

Just like her.

It wasn’t like her to have such sad, self-defeating thoughts. But this one couldn’t be denied. She’d been wanted when she’d been a fresh, young flower, but her petals had begun to wilt and… hello, trashcan.

She stared down at the papers in front of her, at the ugly, simple pen that lay across them.

She picked up the pen.

It wasn’t that she’d been thrown away because she’d aged. She wasn’t even thirty yet. No, it wasn’t age that had wilted her. It had been the marriage itself. And that’s what she had so much trouble accepting. The marriage had chewed her up and spat her out and then blamed her for being a little worse for wear.

Peter hadn’t wanted a wife, in the end. A bride, he’d been over the moon about. But all that bride energy and luster and magic fades eventually. And all he had been left with was a loopy wife with no skills and no friends and nowhere else to be but always at home. In their immaculately decorated house. With all those rooms that weren’t meant for lounging or eating or hide and seek. No, those rooms were meant for nothing more than admiring.

The rooms in Jean Luc’s house were not meant for admiring. Sure, they were sights to behold. With their strange furniture and stranger wallpaper. With their funky smells and flooring bleached by the pattern of the sun through the windows. And Caroline had loved admiring each and every room over the last few days. Something about the house called to her. The land, too.

She let her eyes drift out the window, to all that rioting, untamed green, and the periwinkle sky laid out over top. She’d always loved the Everglades. She’d been here a few times. Trailing Peter around the country while he was on business. He’d stayed in whatever high-rise hotel his company was paying for in Miami. But Caroline would always rent a car and drive south, drive west. The Everglades called to her, more than the ocean even.

She had plenty of experience with the ocean. She and Peter had a house on the steely, gray Atlantic just north of Boston, in Swampscott. Of course, he had his condo in the city as well. So he wouldn’t have to commute every day. But she’d stayed in the gorgeous, wide-windowed Swampscott house. Where every room had a view of the slate-gray ocean.

So, no. When she came down here on Peter’s business trips, she didn’t spend time at the beach, even though she was well aware that the ocean down here was much closer to a tropical experience than anything else. She didn’t care. She wanted the inland. She wanted the strange. She wanted the spooky, melodious quiet of the swamps.

Suddenly, a thought hit her like a bolt of lightning. She put two pieces together that had been floating vaguely around in the soup of her thoughts. She stood straight up and glanced at her watch. It was time to start on dinner anyways. She could ask Jean Luc then. Electricity zipped through her veins. If it was true then it would mean that she was really supposed to be here. That all of this was meant.

She shoved back her chair and raced from the parlor.

A few minutes later, Tre peeked his head into the parlor and frowned when he didn’t see Caroline sitting at that table under the window the way she had for most of the afternoon. At first he’d thought she’d been playing solitaire or something, but no, he’d seen that she’d simply been lost in thought. For hours. And then, the third time he’d checked on her, he’d realized that she’d had those papers spread out in front of her, and a pen dancing in her nervous fingers. He’d understood then and resolved not to disturb her in the least.

Now, though, it was almost dinnertime, the papers were spread out in a wheel on the table, and no Caroline in sight. It was not his business, he told himself. In no world was this anything even remotely resembling his business.

He lingered in the doorway, his knuckles knocking in an old nervous habit against the doorjamb of the room. He was a curious person. Always had been. That was no small part of the reason he made such a gifted hacker. Tre enjoyed solving mysteries, following threads, having his questions answered. But Caroline was a person. Not a question. And he’d already snooped in her life enough.

He’d taken the liberty of hacking her husband’s email and personal accounts back when the group had been in Northern Michigan. That’s how he’d found out about the cheating. He had been beating himself up about whether or not to say anything to her when she’d revealed that they were getting a divorce. He figured, maybe she knew about the cheating and maybe she didn’t. Either way, it wasn’t his to tell. Did it really matter? Seeing as how they were getting a divorce anyways? Wouldn’t it just hurt her more if he told her now? Hurt her unnecessarily?

Tre heard Caroline humming to herself in the kitchen as she opened the fridge and the cabinets here and there. He lingered in the doorway of the parlor, his eyes on the table where she’d been sitting for hours.

Almost without telling them to, his legs strode forward. His fingers twitched at his sides as he looked down at the table, the papers, the pen. He sighed, figuring he was already in for a penny, in for a pound. Tre planted his hand on the divorce papers and skewed them a little further so he could see the signature page.

There was one signature there.

And it wasn’t Caroline’s.

Tre eased himself into the chair where she’d sat and frowned down at that empty signature line. She’d sat for hours and hours and still hadn’t brought herself to sign them?

He heard a sound from the kitchen and stood up quickly from the chair, striding out from the parlor, not wanting to be caught looking at the divorce papers.

He’d really, really hoped that his snooping in Northern Michigan could just be put to rest, that he’d never have to admit it and she’d never have to know.

But if she was still holding on to this Peter guy this hard, then there was a good chance she didn’t know just how badly he’d been betraying her.

Ugh. Tre stopped in one of the muggy, dark hallways, the wood paneling warped from the constant humidity. He gently banged his forehead against the wall. He was going to have to tell her.

 

***

 

Martine spent the day on foot, picking around the land surrounding Jean Luc’s childhood home. She’d never been to the Everglades before, but she’d done some research and she knew what to look out for. She wasn’t worried about the alligators. She’d wrestled far worse than that. She was a demon hunter after all.

A familiar, unwelcome feeling washed over her as she picked her way through a field filled with tall grass. She could see Jean Luc’s house in the distance.

She knew this feeling. And she was so ungodly ashamed of it. Martine swiped at wetness under her eyes. Sometimes she didn’t even really believe that she was feeling this way. That she was jealous of these mortals. There was no reason to be jealous. Their problems were so mundane. Their lives, painfully short. Glory, for them, was rare and fleeting.

But they have families.

They can have children.

They have love.

She hissed at her own thoughts. It barely mattered what they had. What she had was infinitely more meaningful. She was a fighter for justice. She kept the dark from the edges of the world. She protected mortals. She was revered and respected by other demon hunters. That was enough for her.

It didn’t matter that she was becoming more and more lonely as the decades slowly passed. It didn’t matter that her last experience with this particular demon had left her as nothing more than a wrecked failure. It didn’t matter that she was terrified that what had happened then would happen again.

That mission had happened, it had been a failure, and now it was over. She couldn’t destroy herself over it for the rest of her existence.

It was not the reason that she wanted to capture Arturo instead of killing him.

Even though killing him would be considerably easier.

Even though he was particularly dangerous.

No! No. She was right. Capturing him made much more sense. If they captured him, then they could use him as a tool just as the demon had been. Arturo was to be viewed as a weapon and nothing more.

It was the most logical way of getting what she wanted. And what she wanted was to protect these humans at all costs. She turned and looked back at Jean Luc’s house. Where she knew they all were.

Probably talking and laughing with one another. And she was out here, on the outside, as usual. She knew she was the outlier. The odd man out. It had never bothered her before.

And she hated that it bothered her now.

 

***

 

“Sit down!” Caroline urged everyone, a huge smile on her face. “Thea and I made dinner.”

The group sat down then, a bit more eager for the food now that they knew that Caroline had had help. It wasn’t that she was a bad cook. It was that she was a very unusual cook. Thea, however, stuck to the basics and did them well. There was baked mac and cheese, a gorgeous salad and pan of roasted vegetables, and some grilled chicken.

They sat in the dining room, which was strange for Jean Luc, considering he and Hugo and Claude used to sit around the kitchen counter to eat. He could count the number of times he’d sat at this dining room table on one hand. It didn’t bother him to do so now, it was just a bit strange.

“Okay,” Caroline said, a little sparkle in her eye. “This is family dinner. We’re having it tonight, obviously. But we’re also going to have it every night. All of us eating together, okay?” She looked around at all of them, her happiness so palpable it was almost fierce. “And two people who aren’t me and Thea are going to clean up.”

The group turned to the food.

“And!” Caroline held up a finger and the group pulled their hands back from the silverware and looked back at her. “We’re all going to do something together after dinner. A movie or a board game or something.” She looked around at the bemused faces of her friends. “We’ll start easy with a movie tonight.”

“You’re seeming awfully…” Jack searched for the right word, “…gung ho this evening, Caroline. Any particular reason?”

“Yes!” she nodded that head of tumbling chestnut hair and treated all of them to a particularly sparkling smile. Tre choked on the beer he’d just been attempting to swallow and coughed it out. For the most part, he was used to that sparkle of hers, but tonight it was particularly potent. “I realized something today.”

“What’s that?” Thea asked her, serving salad onto her plate and then Jack’s and then, just because, onto Martine’s plate as well. Martine looked up at her in surprise.

“I realized that I am definitely, absolutely, supposed to be here.”

They all looked at her for a minute, lots of eyebrows raised.

“I thought we already went through that, Caroline, darlin’,” Jack said softly. Caroline had stolen her copy of the map from her husband’s family. She’d broken down and revealed their impending divorce as if it were a betrayal to the group as a whole. She’d felt that it meant that she wasn’t supposed to be here at all. That she was endangering the group by having deprived Peter of the right to be there.

They’d all reassured her that they wouldn’t have preferred Peter. That the map had a way of choosing the right person. That it was destiny for her to be there.

Apparently, she hadn’t been completely convinced if she was bouncing off her chair to tell them the reason she’d finally accepted it.

She waved her hand at Jack. “Well, yes, we went through it, but I still felt left out. Like the one who didn’t quite belong, until today.” Caroline didn’t notice Martine’s green-eyed stare on the side of her face.

“What happened today?” Celia asked, scooping a large forkful of mac and cheese into her mouth. She was painfully aware of Jean Luc across the table, but was trying to pretend that she was not. Not at all. Not in the least. She flirted with and laughed with and jumped into the arms of gorgeous, famous men all the time. No big deal. She definitely had not been replaying the whole experience on repeat in her head all day. She definitely was not blushing right now, just thinking about it again. No way. It was hot in here, was all. That was why she was blushing. Not because of Jean Luc’s humongous, muscly presence across the table.

“I realized something,” Caroline said. “Remembered something important.” She leaned across the table and laid a friendly hand over Jean Luc’s. Tre and Celia’s eyes both zoomed in on it like circling hawks in the sky. “Your uncle, his name was Claude, right?”

Jean Luc nodded, looking like he might know what was coming.

“Did he sometimes go by Crazy Claude?”

Jean Luc couldn’t help but laugh. “That he did.”

“I knew it!” Caroline crowed, delight lighting up her features. “I didn’t make the connection before. I didn’t realize that his last name was LaTour. I just thought that was what he called his business, because it was French for ‘tour’ or something.”

“I’m sorry,” Thea said, frowning. “What the hell is going on?”

Jean Luc, smiling abashedly, scraped a hand over his face. “LaTour’s Tours with Crazy Claude. Come see the Everglades the French way.”

Thea stared at him. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “What the hell is going on?”             

Jean Luc rose from the table, shaking his head. He returned a minute later with a dusty photo album that he opened up to a certain page and held open for the group to see. “There’s Uncle Claude. He’d guiding a tour on his airboat.”

“Is he wearing a striped shirt and a red scarf? And a beret?” Celia could barely believe her eyes.

“Oh yeah,” Caroline said. “He did tours of the Everglades but totally played up the whole French stereotype thing. He wore a fake mustache and hammed up the accent. It was hysterical. I have no idea why it worked, but it just kind of…”

“Did,” Jean Luc finished. “He had so much charisma. And he knew he needed an edge over all the other schmucks with airboats around here. He needed something in particular to draw the tourists. So he played up the French thing, even though he was French Canadian. And people liked it. It made the tours more fun. Totally random. But totally fun.” He turned to Caroline. “I take it you partook in one of these tours?”

She nodded, a huge grin on her face. “About six years ago. I came down here with Peter, but he was busy in Miami. I drove through Homestead, looking for a tour. But I’d done a few before and I wanted something different. Somebody told me about your uncle and I was all in. It was the best tour I’ve ever done. Informative and thrilling and hilarious. It was just me and him and another couple. Afterwards, I stuck around for a bit and just talked to him.” Her eyes went a little distant, a little faraway. “He told me that it sounded like I married the wrong guy. He had two sons who would be much better for me. I assume he was talking about you and your brother. He tried to give me your numbers.”

Jean Luc groaned into his hand, a healthy blush working its way up his cheeks. “Jesus, I’m so sorry, Caroline. That was so rude of him.”

“No!” she shook her head. “I thought it was funny at the time. And turns out, he was right. I did marry the wrong guy.” She sighed and pushed food around on her plate. “I’m just so thrilled that I have a connection to this place, the way Tre and Celia had a connection to Northern Michigan, you know? It means that I’m a part of it. Of all of this. I’m so relieved! I hated being the odd man out.”

Martine eyed her for a long time. “You were never the odd man out.”

“Sure felt like it,” Caroline said, a little laugh on her voice. “Isn’t it crazy what we can convince ourselves of?”             

The rest of the dinner passed in friendly conversation, just the way that Caroline had hoped it would. Afterward, when Celia was clearing dishes, she paused over the photo album, her eyes zooming in hard on one particular feature.

“Oh my God,” she muttered under her breath, her eyes widening in delight.

“Don’t say a word,” Jean Luc growled, leaning over her back to see which picture she was looking at, though he was pretty sure he already knew.

Celia tried very hard not to go still when she felt the heat of him at her back. He was just so big, she could feel him everywhere. She cleared her throat. “Tell me this preteen in a beret is you. Just tell me that and make my dreams come true.”

He chuckled. “I plead the fifth.”

“Oh my God. You weren’t lying! You were a dork!” It utterly delighted her to no end to know that the athletic hottie behind her had at one point suffered from dorkdom as much as she had. Because this kid in this picture was not cool. He was big and awkward and there were almost no hints that he was going to grow up to be athletic and handsome. None. She looked at the picture closer. “Dang, you were all ears.”

“Alright, alright,” he grumbled, flipping the photo album closed. “I’m still all ears, for the record.”

She turned and forced herself not to step back. They were almost as close as they’d been that afternoon on the screened-in porch, leaning on one another and laughing. She peered up at him and squinted at his face. She saw, with a little jolt, that he did, in fact, have a lot of ear to work with. “Wow. You’re right. How come I never noticed that before?”

“The beard helps even me out a little,” he said, looking down at her, a blush rising lightly on his cheeks.

She nodded and stepped around him with the plates toward the kitchen. The beard was definitely not the reason she hadn’t noticed his big ears. She loaded the dishes in the dishwasher and then made sure that she and Martine were definitely alone in the kitchen.              

“Do you think Jean Luc is handsome?” Celia whispered to Martine.

Martine looked up and narrowed her eyes, like she was trying to figure out why she was being asked this question. She shrugged. “I think I’ve made my stance on his attractiveness clear in the past.”

“No,” Celia shook her head, still whispering and blushing to beat the band. “I don’t mean attractive. Anyone with a body like that qualifies as attractive. I mean handsome.”

Martine dumped food into a Tupperware and gave it considerable thought. “I guess not. He’s a little plain. Except for those eyes of his. Which are special.”

“Right.” Her suspicions were confirmed. She leaned back for a second and pulled her phone out of her pocket. In a matter of seconds she was looking at an endless string of Google images of him. Pictures of him all geared up, black, sweaty stripes under his eyes, his arm cocked back for a perfect throw. There were pictures of him in a suit and tie during a press conference. Pictures of him surrounded by screaming, smiling kids, posing for a picture with a football star. In each one of those pictures, Celia’s stomach swooped hard and low, like a seagull skimming an inch above the waves. But as she studied them, she could see now that his ears poked out just a little far. His features were definitely, just a little, plain. Huh.

She took another second and Googled a picture of Chris Evans. Then of Matt Bomer. Yeah. Yup. Handsome. Classically so. But they didn’t swoop her belly. Huh.

“Movie time!” Caroline called into the kitchen. Celia looked from her cloud of thought to see that the kitchen had been set back to rights. The food put away.

“Oh. Crap. I’m sorry for not helping more, Martine.”

“No, no,” Martine waved her hand with a little smile on her face. “I can tell you had something else on your mind. Seemed important.”

Celia was the last to join the group in the TV room. It was really the most conventional room in the whole house. It was painted a regular old blue and had a large sectional couch and a couple armchairs all pointing toward a gigantic flatscreen. Jack and Thea were curled up together in one of the armchairs, Tre had claimed the other. Martine and Caroline were on the long end of the sectional and Jean Luc was half-sprawled across the short end. The lights were out and the movie was already flickering to a start.

Jean Luc caught her eye as she walked in and he straightened up a little, making room for her on the short end of the sectional. Alright. Apparently she was sitting there, between the arm of the couch and Jean Luc.

She sat down and turned toward the TV, trying not to freeze up when her knee knocked against his.

“Anybody want blankets?” Jean Luc asked, standing up and moving over toward a chest in the corner. He passed them out to everybody and came back to sit next to Celia, who’d declined a blanket. This time, when he sat down, he was close enough that when their knees knocked, they stayed touching. Just a single point of zinging contact. Celia could have sworn her knee was fifteen degrees hotter than the rest of her body.

The movie played and she faced the screen, the images zipping past her eye, but she couldn’t have said what the story was about. She took long deep breaths, but even that wasn’t enough to keep her leg from trembling, a little tapping up and down that completely destroyed the nonchalant air she was trying so oxymoronically hard to cultivate. So, she shifted. Away from him. And so did he, immediately. Celia cursed herself for destroying the spell. She didn’t settle. Instead, she drew her legs up onto the couch, leaned against the arm, and sprawled out a little, taking up far less space than he had when he’d sprawled. Seemingly casually, she slid sideways and pressed her toes to his knee.

He hissed and she turned to him, whipping her toes away.

“No,” he murmured in a whisper that only she could hear. “It’s okay. You’re just cold is all.” He lifted his leg a few inches and jerked his head back his way. Was he inviting her back in? Slowly, her eyes on his, she extended her legs again and pressed her toes into the little cavern of space he was creating under his knee. He let the weight of his leg back down and her chilly toes were fully cocooned in the warm cave of his leg and the couch cushions.

She couldn't help but shiver, just a little, as she settled back down onto the couch. The rest of the movie was a blur.