Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 504(@200wpm)___ 403(@250wpm)___ 336(@300wpm)
I swallow that down. It’s bitter but not surprising. Not even a little.
“What does she do with my aunts on the full moon?” I whisper.
She gives me a wan smile, brushing her hair off her head with a swipe of her arm. “I am not a witch, so I could not tell you what she does. But I do know this. Your mother takes. She took from your father, she’ll take from you. And when she goes to the school on those full moons, she goes to something that gives.”
Then she turns her back to me and starts on the carrots next. “Now, if you please, I have to prepare all this extra food, which I was not prepared for.”
“Sure,” I say softly, stewing on everything she just told me. I slowly walk away, feeling dazed, and go to my bedroom, shutting the door behind me and sitting on my bed.
My father was the only one who cared about me, the only one who gave instead of taking. He loved me, loved me enough for me to leave Sleepy Hollow.
Why did he have to be the one to die?
Why did he have to leave me with someone who treats me like a commodity, a bushel that could be traded for something in return?
Something wet drips on my hand, and it takes me a moment to realize that I’m crying. Instead of pushing the tears away like I usually do, I let them fall. I collapse onto my side on the bed, and I sob for my father, my fingers making fists in the bedsheets, the sorrow rocking through me. I miss him, miss his devotion, his love, the way he made me feel safe, a safety I didn’t realize I’d been searching for.
A safety I know I’ll never have with my mother.
I don’t think one can ever feel so alone as when the person who you think is supposed to love and protect you, the person who should be your rock, just ends up being a shadow.
A couple of hours later, the Van Brunts are seated at the dining room table with my mother and me. They were insistent that Brom sit at one end of the table and I at the other, like my father and mother used to do. I think it disturbs me as much as it does Brom, but he’s hard to read tonight. Then again, there’s nothing to be read when it comes to him.
His parents are equally as strange but in a different way. I’ve known Emilie and Liam Van Brunt my whole life, and they’ve always been peculiar. I would chalk it up to her being a witch and Liam being a stoic farmer, a man of few words. But their relationship with Brom always felt more like they were distant cousins rather than parents. It was common in these parts of the country, especially among Dutch immigrant farmers, for there to be a coldness and distance in families. Life was about surviving in a new land. Children were often seen as someone to help on the farm. They were never coddled or fussed over.
And yet with Brom’s parents, there wasn’t any of that. Brom did work on the farm, hence how he got his strong physique, but his father had money and hired people to do most of the work. And they were never cold with him either; they just kind of existed. People he shared a house with, nothing more. They were ice cold but never cruel. Indifferent but never callous.
Tonight is no different. It should be different. They should be overjoyed, hugging him, perhaps even crying at their good fortune of his return. Instead, they’re stiff in their seats and staring at him with stretched smiles on their faces, barely talking, just observing him and, on occasion, me.
The only sense of normalcy in this dinner party is Famke. Despite everything she told me earlier, Famke is busy serving the roast pumpkin and salted pork and making sure everyone is fed and happy, commenting on how it’s been such a long time since we had any guests over. That much is true. When Mary first moved to Sleepy Hollow and I had been spending a lot of time with her, my mother had her family over for dinner, but never again after that. Her family was a little too “normal” for us, I think. And other than visits to the doctor and to her sisters at the school, my mother doesn’t seem to have a social life or any friends. Even though she always stayed friendly with the Van Brunts since Brom had disappeared, it was never the same. He was the glue holding them together.
Sometimes I think Brom was the glue holding me together. After my father died, I turned to him for comfort and company, to his brazen strength. After he left, I had to learn to get those things on my own (after all, my mother wasn’t an option). If he’d stayed, I know I would have married him, had children, and become a wife, and I would have never learned who I was without all the glue to fix the cracks.