If only they could get out from under Elizabeth’s influence—if only she could be sure that Mateo could be hers to keep, that there was no chance of having him stolen away—

The clanging of a pan on the stove jolted her back to the here and now. “Hey. What are you doing?”

“Making us some spaghetti.” Dad had taken out a glass jar of some sauce from the store. “The pasta—that’s going to be on this shelf, right? Yes. Huh, no spaghetti, but we have these tube things, and that works just the same.”

“Dad. I’ll make dinner.”

“Don’t be silly.” He didn’t even slow down, like he wasn’t listening to her at all. “I’ve got this. How hard can it be?”

“That stuff in the jar is from, like, a factory. I can make it from scratch in half an hour, and it’ll be ten times better.”

“Yeah, I know, but this is all right, isn’t it? You’ve eaten it before. Cole even likes it; he put it in the shopping cart himself.”

“That’s not the point.” Why was he being so annoying? Nadia wanted him out of her kitchen, where he was going to make a mess, plus gross pasta sauce. She tried the buttering-up approach. “You won your big hearing today. So you should take the night off, right? Let us treat you.”

“The treat for me is fixing dinner for my family.” Dad was starting to look about as ticked off as she felt. “Don’t you have some homework to do? You never seem to have any homework.”

“Dad. Come on.” Nadia tried to snatch the packet of rigatoni from him. To her surprise, he grabbed on to it tighter, and for half a second they were in the world’s stupidest tug-of-war, she and her father almost fighting over a bag of pasta—

—until it ripped apart, scattering rigatoni all over the kitchen so that it clattered on the counters and the floor, rolled into the living room, even got into Nadia’s hair.

She stared at her father, who stared right back, until at the same moment they bent to their knees to start scooping it up. She huffed, “I’ve got it, okay?”

“No! It’s not okay!” Dad wasn’t shouting—he never shouted—but he was as close to angry as he ever got.

“Why are you yelling at me? I was just trying to help out! I’m always trying to help out! Most parents would like that, you know, not scream at their kids when they try to be nice—”

“Jesus Christ, are you ever going to let me do anything for you?” Dad’s voice broke on the last word, and then he sat back on the floor, right there in the middle of all the pasta, and leaned his head into one hand. For one horrifying second, Nadia thought he was going to cry, but he didn’t.

She felt like she was frozen there on her knees, one hand full of uncooked pasta. But slowly she eased herself into a seated position; whatever Dad was waiting for, she felt like she needed to wait it out with him. From the backyard, they could hear Cole yelling out the details of some imaginary battle involving all his action figures.

Finally Dad said, “I know you do a lot for this family, Nadia. You’ve really stepped up since your mother—since she left. And I appreciate that. I couldn’t make it without you.”

“Thank you.” Her voice seemed very small.

“But you’re still my daughter, okay? It’s my job to take care of you. It’s not your job to take care of me.”

He didn’t have any idea. Elizabeth’s whirlwind was coming for them, for everyone in town, and scary as it was, Nadia’s witchcraft might be the only thing that could stop her. If Nadia wasn’t taking care of her father, of all of them, who knew what might happen?

Still—she could let the man cook once in a while, if it made him feel better. Even if it meant eating nasty sauce from a jar. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry I fought with you over the bag. That was stupid.”

Dad just sat there, forearms on his knees, staring at nothing in particular. “Never learned to cook. Always left that to your mom. I let that firm take so much of my life—eighty hours a week, ninety, more—and she always said it was all right. She had the home front covered. That was our deal, how it was supposed to work. I thought—I really thought she was okay with it.”

Nadia remembered Mom laughing about the “home front.” It had been one of her favorite jokes. “I thought she was, too.”

He shook his head. “I was a fool. I should’ve known that couldn’t work forever.”

“It worked fine. Everything was absolutely fine until one day, Mom—it was like she checked out.” How else could she even say it? Nadia had known before Mom left that something was wrong, but only for a couple of weeks—a couple of weeks during which Mom had hardly seemed to notice they were even around. “You didn’t do anything.”

“I don’t know. Guess we don’t get to know.” He sighed and thumped the back of his head once, softly, against the counters, then looked at the kitchen with something like his usual good humor. “Tonight’s another pizza night, isn’t it?”

“Looks like it.”

“You order, and I’ll clean up.”

“Okay,” she said, even though she was sure this meant she’d find lost rigatoni noodles lying around the kitchen for another day or two to come.

“And—we should take a break sometime soon. As a family. Maybe take a weekend away. Go down to New York, maybe. Keep our city-dweller cred current, you know?”