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delicious meal Lucinda’s prepared?” It was sure to be delicious—she was a great cook.
    The others quickly took up the “I’m hungry” chant. Lucinda smiled graciously at me. “Well, since our guests are ready to eat, I suppose we can table any further ideas about the reception for a time when we’re not in a state of emergency.” She got up and headed for the kitchen.
    Everyone else looked at each other. It was clear no one really knew what to say. I didn’t want us discussing the only state of emergency I knew about, which involved naked pictures of me and Chuckie. I could tell Amy and Christopher didn’t want to talk about weddings or receptions or anything remotely similar. Chuckie had his “you owe me” expression going and I knew it would be a bad idea to try to make him come up with a legitimate state of emergency excuse. I’d used up my only idea already.
    “I smell meatloaf,” Tito announced as if nothing untoward had happened, thankfully breaking the uncomfortable silence in the room.
    Jeff groaned. “It figures.”

    Yi

CHAPTER 7

    C HUCKIE GLANCED AT ME. “I think you should help your mother-in-law in the kitchen.”
    I was about to ask when, in all the years he’d known me, my helping in a kitchen had ever been a good idea, when Jeff nodded. “Yeah, please do, baby.”
    The idea of arguing appealed to me, but I decided to do as asked. Surely they both had a reason for this request.
    Sure enough, they did—I trotted into the kitchen to hear the sounds of someone crying quietly.
    Lucinda had her face buried in a dish towel. Okay, this wasn’t good. I went to her and put my arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry we can’t have the party.” It was a lie, but sometimes you had to tell a whopper to make someone else feel better.
    She shook her head, face still buried, shoulders still shaking.
    “Um, sorry you and Amy had a fight. She just really wants you to like her.” This was true, though Amy probably wasn’t going to be pleased I’d told Lucinda so.
    Lucinda took her face out of the towel. “I do like her.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly in that way you do when you’re trying really hard not to lose it again. “I don’t understand why Richard isn’t insisting on this party. Just because he’s retired as Pontifex doesn’t mean he should be ignoring things.”
    Things. Not traditions. “Um, what things, exactly, is Richard ignoring?”
    Lucinda heaved a sigh. “The fact that without a big wedding, or at least a reception where I can show Amy off, no one believes we want her in the family.”
    This was a twist I hadn’t seen coming. “Why not? I can’t believe that in all A-C history no one’s chosen to skip the big wedding parade and just get married quietly.”
    “Oh, of course, many don’t do a large wedding. However, Christopher’s position within the community and our family . . .” Her voice faltered. “It’s so hard to deal with talented children when you have no talents yourselves.”
    I chose not to ask what this had to do with anything we were discussing. “Oh?”
    “You can’t hide the things from them that you can from other children. So when you’re cross or they’ve been bad and you have to punish them, they think you hate them. They can’t understand why you might be jealous of someone even though you love them. They just see the negative and assume that’s all there is to your feelings for them.”
    She was talking in generalities, but it was easy for me to put in the specifics. Christopher’s mother, Terry, had been an empath, which was rare for A-C females. Because his powers had been off the charts at birth, she’d had to take Jeff when he was a baby, so she’d been like his mother, too. When Terry had died, the boys had come to Alfred and Lucinda, and I knew they considered Christopher their “other” son.
    But as far as I knew, Christopher didn’t think of Lucinda as his mother, and his father was alive. And as the