When she saw me, she struggled to sit up. “How is he?” she demanded, only a trace of her usual starch in her voice.
I hesitated, not sure how to answer. Did she want to be reassured, or did she want the truth? Oh, who was I kidding? This was Gloria. She’d want the truth. “I honestly don’t know. He’s being weird. And stubborn.”
“I wonder where he learned that?” James muttered, and I had to fight not to laugh.
“I think it’s getting to him, but it’s taking a while to sink in,” I said. Even though I hadn’t been invited to do so, and Gloria was someone who took that sort of thing seriously, I sat on the chair across from the sofa. “The big question is, is it true? If it is, who really knew? Right now, Owen doesn’t seem to want to even think about it, but I believe it’s important to get to the bottom of this. What did you know?”
James sat next to Gloria on the sofa and said, “The situation is, as you may imagine, complicated. We didn’t know who he was, but we did know he was a special case because his abilities were unusually strong in someone that age and because of the difficulties he’d already gone through. That can be a recipe for disaster if the child isn’t properly trained.”
“The Council wanted us to train and monitor him,” Gloria continued. “But we were not supposed to become emotionally involved. Doting, overly permissive parents have been the downfall of many a powerful child. In the nonmagical world we had the rights of foster parents, but within the magical world, guardianship rested with the Council, and they could take him away at any time. We had to remain neutral so we could objectively observe his progress.” Her voice cracked. “It was a difficult situation—if we showed signs of loving him too much, we would lose him, and yet we soon came to love him too much to bear the thought of losing him. Our inexperience as parents probably meant we weren’t able to strike quite the right balance, and we erred on the side of duty.”
“We had always wanted children of our own, but we were not blessed in that way,” James said, placing a hand over his wife’s. That simple gesture brought tears to my eyes.
Gloria gave a crooked smile. “And then one day they brought us this little boy. He was so small—he was rather sickly at first. He hadn’t been taken care of very well. He was so quiet, and we later learned his vision was weak. I was expected to treat him as though he was a pupil at a single-student boarding school, and I was his matron. If I ever seemed too attached to him, then I would have been deemed unfit for my job.”