Someday, maybe, we’d get used to each other. I didn’t want to leave. I know you’ll think that was the best option – I had my settlement, all the millions of dollars and millions more in property that he’d given me just for being his child, and I could have gone anywhere, done anything, and never worried about a thing. Yes. All that’s true.

But I wanted him. I needed something to anchor me to the world, to remind me to be at least a semi-decent person. Grant did that for me. He’d come from nothing, been made in a time when nothing was expected from him, and he’d done all this. Black Industries, the covenhouse, the survival of a hundred and fifty years in a coffin. He’s the most amazing man I think I shall ever meet, not merely that I have already met.

As I watched him climb the ladder to put the star on top of the tree – the first and only one the Denver Covenhouse would ever see – I knew why I stayed, though it seemed at times that I wanted nothing to do with him and he wanted only to control me.

He was a good man, and I was not a good woman. I needed him to make me better.

Simmons hustled away with the ladder, and I flipped most of the other lights off. The tree glowed softly in the corner, that magic light that makes anything possible – even a fat man coming to bring presents to a gang of murderers.

“Merry Christmas,” I said, and folded myself against Grant’s chest.

“Let’s hope so,” he said, and wrapped me in his arms.

THE END

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