Courtney had asked to go alone.
Not alone exactly. She had asked for just Tierney and Katherine, no one else, and she had asked it quietly the night before with a calm that was doing a lot of work to hold something more complicated underneath it. Katherine had agreed immediately. Tierney had agreed without asking why.
Niall had been the one to ask.
He had found Courtney in the kitchen after dinner, the two of them alone while the others drifted off to various corners of the house, and he had sat across from her at the table and just looked at her until she looked back.
"You're not taking me," he said.
"No," she said.
"Why."
Courtney turned her cup slowly on the table, watching her own hands. "Because if you're there I'll be okay," she said. "And I need to be able to be okay on my own first."
Niall was quiet for a moment.
"That makes sense," he said.
"I know it does."
"I don't like it."
"I know that too."
He had nodded and let it go, which was one of the things about Niall that Katherine had come to understand was rarer and more valuable than it looked. He knew when to stay and he knew when to step back and he almost always got it right.
The drive to Courtney's parents was the longest of the three.
They lived further out, past the edge of the city where the neighborhoods spread apart and the houses sat on wider lots with more sky between them. Courtney sat in the back beside Katherine and held her moon blade in her lap, not as a weapon, just as something to hold, turning it slowly in her fingers the way other people turned rings or worry beads.
Katherine watched her from the corner of her eye.
Courtney's face was composed and still, her long brown hair falling forward slightly, her light brown eyes fixed on the middle distance. She had the look of someone who had been preparing for something for a long time and had finally arrived at the moment of it.
"Have you talked to them at all?" Katherine asked. "Since everything."
"Twice," Courtney said. "Short calls. I told them I was safe and that I'd explain everything when I could." She paused. "My mom cried both times."
"And your dad?"
A small complicated smile crossed Courtney's face. "My dad asked if I was eating enough."
Katherine smiled too. "That tracks."
"He asks that about everything," Courtney said. "First day of school. After every exam. When I told him I was learning to drive." The smile faded slowly back into the quiet. "He's going to ask today too."
"And are you?" Katherine said. "Eating enough."
"Katherine."
"I'm just asking."
"Yes," Courtney said. "I'm eating enough."
"Good."
Tierney glanced at them in the rearview mirror briefly, something soft in her expression, and said nothing.
The house appeared at the end of a long straight road, a wide single story house with a covered porch and a garden that in summer was probably full of color but now in the gray winter light sat patient and dormant, waiting for a warmer season.
Courtney's mother was not at the window.
She was on the porch.
She had been on the porch, sitting in one of the chairs with a blanket over her lap and a cup of something warm in her hands, and when the car turned into the driveway she stood up slowly and set the cup down on the rail and stood there watching the car stop with an expression that Katherine could see even from inside the car, open and unguarded and full of something that had been waiting a long time to be allowed out.
Courtney got out of the car.
Her mother came down the porch steps and they met in the middle of the path and her mother held her daughter's face in both hands and looked at her for a long moment before she pulled her close, the specific embrace of a woman who had spent many nights not knowing and was now finally knowing, finally holding, finally sure.
Courtney held on.
Katherine stayed by the car with Tierney, giving them the moment, watching the gray sky above the dormant garden.
Courtney's father appeared in the doorway of the house. He was a broad quiet man with dark tan skin and close cropped hair going silver at the temples, and he came down the steps slowly with his hands clasped in front of him and waited until his wife stepped back before he put both arms around Courtney and held her with the steady unhurried certainty of a man who had decided a long time ago that he was going to be the kind of father his children could always come back to.
"You're thin," he said into the top of her head.
Courtney laughed, wet and sudden, pressing her face against his shoulder. "I knew you were going to say that."
"Because it's true."
"I've been eating."
"I'll make lunch," he said simply, like that settled it, and stepped back and looked at her face with careful eyes. "You're okay."
"I'm okay, Dad."
He nodded. He looked over her head at Katherine and Tierney by the car and he held Katherine's gaze for a moment with an expression that was measuring and quiet and not unfriendly, the same assessment every parent had given her these past two days, the same question underneath it.
Katherine met it the same way she had met the others.
He seemed satisfied with whatever he found. He tilted his head toward the house.
"Come inside," he said. "All of you."
The house was warm and low ceilinged and full of photographs, more photographs than either of the other houses had been, covering almost every wall, a record of a family that documented itself carefully and kept everything. Courtney as a baby. Courtney at various ages, grinning at the camera with the easy confidence of a child who had always felt secure. A woman Katherine didn't recognize who looked enough like Courtney to be a sister or an aunt.
They sat in the living room and Courtney told them what she could, the same shaped truth they had given the others, careful and honest in the places that mattered most.
Her mother listened with her hands folded in her lap, her eyes moving between Courtney's face and Katherine's and Tierney's, reading the room with quiet intelligence. Her father sat in the armchair by the window and listened without interrupting, which Katherine understood from Courtney's expression was very much his way.
When Courtney finished her mother was quiet for a moment.
"Your eyes," her mother said.
Courtney stilled.
Her mother leaned forward slightly. "When you called me the second time I thought it was the phone but your eyes looked different. In the video." She searched her daughter's face. "They look different now too. Not wrong," she added quickly. "Just different. Like there's more in them."
Courtney held her mother's gaze.
"I've seen some things," Courtney said carefully. "I've done some things. I think maybe that changes how you look."
Her mother considered this. "Are you still you?"
"Yes," Courtney said. "I'm still me."
Her mother nodded slowly, something in her settling. "Okay," she said. "Then okay."
Her father made lunch, a large and unhurried production of it, moving around the kitchen with quiet purpose while the others sat at the table and let the domesticity of it wash over them. He made enough food for twice the number of people present, which Katherine suspected was entirely intentional, and he set it down without fanfare and told everyone to eat.
They ate.
Courtney sat between her parents at the table and let her mother fix her hair the way mothers do, smoothing it back from her face without asking permission, and her father kept adding things to her plate when she wasn't looking and she kept pretending not to notice.
Katherine watched it all from across the table and felt something in her chest that was quiet and full and a little bit sad all at once, the way you feel when you see something beautiful that you also know is temporary.
Not because it was ending.
Just because everything good had edges, and knowing that was part of being old enough to really see it.
When they left Courtney's mother held her on the porch for a long time with her eyes closed and then stepped back and looked at her daughter and straightened her jacket with both hands, the small fussing gesture of a woman sending someone she loves back out into a world she cannot fully protect them from.
"You come back," she said. Not a question. A requirement.
"I'll come back," Courtney said.
Her father hugged her once more at the bottom of the steps, brief and strong, and then he looked at Tierney.
"She matters," he said. Quiet and plain.
"I know," Tierney said. "She matters to all of us."
He held Tierney's gaze for a moment and nodded, and that was that.
In the car on the way home Courtney sat with her hands in her lap and her head leaning against the window, watching the streets go by, and she was quiet for so long that Katherine thought she might have drifted off.
Then she said, "My dad put three extra portions on my plate when he thought I wasn't looking."
"I saw," Katherine said.
"He does that every time. Since I was little." A pause. "I used to pretend to be annoyed by it."
"Used to?"
Courtney turned her head from the window and looked at Katherine.
"I didn't pretend today," she said.
Katherine looked back at her.
"Good," she said.
Courtney turned back to the window and the car moved through the gray afternoon and nobody needed to say anything else.