But she was sure—and over the last few days, she’d finally learned to be sure of herself.
And she knew that even if she couldn’t wait to know him better—even if she was thrilled to think of familiarizing herself with every little birthmark he had, every story from his childhood, every favorite movie—she already knew him just fine: he was written on the inside of her heart, after all. The last few months of Cooper’s life had really brought home that unexpected events could burst in at any time and shatter all your plans. It made no sense to wait around for the perfect time to do something they both wanted.
“I know we’ll have to wait until everything’s settled,” Cooper continued, “and we’ll have to make sure it doesn’t stir up any kind of fuss in the press coverage, but—"
“Yes.” She wrapped her arms around him. “Definitely yes.”
22
Nobody could fill up a living room like the Miller extended family.
It had been easy to get them together. All Gretchen had had to do was call everyone and say she had something to tell them, and they’d flocked to her house at once. She had to shut the dogs in the spare room so they wouldn’t get all fired up by the pervasive smell of lynx.
She couldn’t just spring her whole family on Cooper without putting them all on their best, calmest behavior first, so he was having dinner and game night with Theo and Jillian and Iz.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to stay?” he had asked her before he left. “You don’t have to tell them who I am right away. Tonight can just be about telling them about your griffin. I don’t want to steal your thunder.”
Gretchen had wrapped her arms around him. “I’m sure. And I’m not worried about you stealing my thunder! It’s just that telling them what I am—that’s something I have to do myself. Besides, you’ve already promised to be Iz’s Trivial Pursuit partner. You can’t go back on that.”
Now, some small part of her wished she’d asked him to stay after all.
But that was silly. Why was she so nervous? They were her family, and what she had to say was nothing but good news.
As it turned out, it would have been a good idea to tell them that before she’d rounded them all up, because now they were all trying to guess.
“You’re moving.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“That smoking hot unicorn guy you work with let you touch his horn.”
Well, that startled her out of her reverie. It was like getting a bucket of cold water thrown on her. “What? Is that a euphemism, or do you actually want to know if I’ve touched his horn?”
“Both,” Anna said cheerfully.
“Aunt Gretchen, you know a unicorn?”
“Aunt Gretchen knows everybody.”
This led to a lively—and very loud—discussion of all the different kinds of shifters everybody knew, and since Bonnie knew a grasshopper mouse shifter, everyone then crowded around to watch a video of a grasshopper mouse killing a scorpion and then doing a shrill little mouse howl at the moon. Even Gretchen had to admit it was adorable.
Tricia was the one who had always—or at least since the horrible day of the bite—understood her the best, and she must have seen something on Gretchen’s face, because once the video was over, she closed her hand over her wife’s to silently keep Bonnie from selecting a second one.
“What’s up, Gretch?” she said, as casually and quietly as if it had just been the two of them in the room.
Gretchen would have hugged her if it wouldn’t have wound up causing even more delay. She took a deep breath.
She almost just said, I have something to show you. Then she could have just slipped into her griffin form—the transformation already felt as easy and natural as water rolling downhill. It would be incredible to see the looks on their faces.
But as much fun as it would have been to spring a surprise griffin on them, Gretchen thought that what she needed wasn’t the big showoff moment but the big moment of trust. The last time she’d insisted that she felt like a shifter, that she had an inner voice, that she was like them—she’d been just a kid. A kid who had needed to be protected from impulses like, say, suggesting her little sister take a bite out of her. She’d spent years feeling like that kid, like she still needed to protect herself against wishful thinking. The last few days had taught her that that wasn’t true, not anymore.
Cooper had shown her the person she really was. He’d known it right away.
She could show that to her family. But it would mean even more if she could find out that they already knew it, that she was the only person who hadn’t trusted herself.
She said, “I found out I’m really a shifter after all.”
The next thing she knew, Tricia had bounded off the sofa and wrapped her in a back-breaking hug.
“Oh, Gretch, that’s amazing. I know it’s what you’ve always wanted.”
And the Miller, Miller-Alvarez, Miller-Sousa, and Miller-Hendrickson-Smith voices were saying things like:
“I knew it! Didn’t I know it?” Bonnie exclaimed. “I said she could bench-press more than any human woman I ever met.”
“Aunt Gretchen, are you a lynx like us?”
“Maybe she’s a badger. There was a badger on my paternal grandfather’s side...”
“How did you find out?”
“Can you shift for us now, or is it going to mess up your clothes?”
They believed her.
They had a billion questions for her, but none of them were anything close to, “Are you sure?”
They—like Cooper, like Martin, like Theo and Colby and even Keith—knew the person she was now, and they trusted her to know what she was doing. Gretchen felt like some balloon strings that had tied her down her whole life had finally been decisively cut. Most of those strings had gotten snipped while she and Cooper were on the road,
