#ytel

Cordelia walked onto the Barrett property, not for the first time since she’d been in town, but the first time for this reason. To see him. Ytel Sturmer. She knew that he had an interest in knowing Lucien, but how could she sign Luci up for that when she knew the kind of instability, the kind of baseless hope at holidays and birthdays, that it could lead to? Oh, of her parents, Ytel was the better one. He had ten times the likelihood to met her son than her mother ever would have, had she lived to that point. He might be selfish and absent, but at least he wasn’t a literal psychopath. 

That was where her life got complicated, she thought to herself. Finding the line between being angry and letting that anger turn you into some kind of monster. It was a line that Belinda could never walk, always tipping into being a monster until she had stopped caring if she ever had. If there had ever been a time that Belinda had been a human, Delia hadn’t been alive to see it. Maybe her father had. Maybe his absence was because he saw too much of her in Delia; that was always her biggest fear concerning him, even if she now had herself convinced that she didn’t care what he thought.

“Ytel,” she said, coming to stop in front of him where he was brushing a fucking horse with her arms crossed over her chest. “Been a while.”

i read a book about old box beds.