I wake up the next morning feeling better than I have in weeks. I mean, I'm utterly exhausted, but besides that. I'd been pushing Felix away for almost two months, out of guilt; depression; shame; self loathing; and even bitter jealousy, just a little.

But his support of me and my idea last night, even if it didn't work the way I'd hoped, reminded me that it didn't matter if I didn't know who I was, at least not all the time, because I knew who we were, him and I, together.

Felix is already up by the time I'm getting out of bed. He's in the kitchen making eggs, a cup of cold coffee sitting forgotten on the counter. The TV in the living room, visible from the kitchenette, is on and has been turned to one of the news channels you can only tune in to if you're a magician. Felix is watching it vaguely as he turns the eggs.

“There has been another raid last night by the Council Guard in response to the recent attack on Councilwoman Shatz,” the anchorwoman was saying. “The Magician's Independence Movement, an extremist splinter group that broke away from the MRF eighteen months ago, has claimed responsibility for the attack. However the lack of either eyewitnesses or direct evidence left at the scene leaves it unclear if this was indeed a politically motivated attack, or whether the terrorist group is simply attaching their name to the event in order to increase their status as a serious threat to the Council. Councilwoman Shatz is still in the hospital, and is unresponsive at this time, though she has been reported to be in stable condition. In other news, a duel-gone-wrong has left one magician with a garden vegetable in place of his nose, and you'll never guess what—”

I tear my eyes away from the TV, sick of it already. I want to hold on to the good feeling in my chest just a little longer.

“Hey,” I say, grinning at Felix.

He glances over at me and grins back. “Hey. You're looking good.”

“I feel good.”

“Yeah, you do,” he says, waggling his eyebrows suggestively at me.

I snort, and go over to the fridge to start rooting through it. “Are we still having dinner at your parent's tonight?”

“As far as I'm aware,” he replies, returning to his cooking. “And bad news, the Richardsons are going to be there too.”

I groan, grabbing a yogurt and slamming the fridge door shut. “Do we have to go?”

“Oh come on, they're not that bad.”

“They keep referring to me as your 'roommate', and then try to set you up with their daughter.”

“...Okay, they're pretty bad. I'll see if I can make up an excuse to have dinner next week instead.”

I sit at the counter and eat the yogurt while Felix starts piling the eggs onto two plates. He hands one to me, and then comes around the counter to take a seat next to me. We eat, and we joke, and for the moment, everything is good again. Even though I feel like I'm further away than ever from finding out who my mom really was and if I have any other family left, it's not eating away at me. Something else will come up, we'll find a new lead. We have to. But for right now, I can just focus on enjoying this.

Felix cooked, so I do the dishes. I glance at the clock and see it's already ten thirty. Damn, did we really sleep in that late?

“I've got to be at the radio station by twelve,” I say to Felix as I dry the last plate. “I'm going to take a shower.”

He's already on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table, flipping through the channels. With the school year over and no job to worry about, he's got more free time than he knows what to do with, especially with me working at the station all the time.

“'Kay,” he grunts, hardly paying attention.

I go into the bathroom, then pause, and stick my head back out the door into the living room. “I wouldn't say no if you wanted to join me, by the way.”

There's a moment of silence, and then Felix throws the remote down and flies off the couch, crossing the room in about three seconds flat.

                                                              * * *

I'm in the middle of re-shelving about a thousand CDs that got dumped to the floor when the cheap shelving unit collapsed under their weight when my phone goes off.

It's my ringtone, not just a text notification, which is unusual since the only people who ever call me instead of texting are Ms. Cross and scammers.

I slide my phone out of my back pocket and glance at the screen. I don't recognize the number, and I almost reject the call—but my thumb hovers over the screen. It doesn't say 'scam likely'.

I answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hello, is this Mr. Adam Wolfe?” a woman asks.

“This is him.”

“Hi, I'm Betty Davis from the department of social services. I'm the social worker that handled your case when your mother passed away.”

There's a moment where my heart clenches, and I swear it skips a full beat. For a moment I think I might be having a heart attack, until I can breath again.

“I... oh,” I say, because I can't think of anything else.

“It took a while for your requests to get to me personally, but I got working on it right away when it did. You're very lucky you decided to look into this when you did; I'm retiring next year, and this process can take over six months under normal circumstances.”

“...Normal circumstances?” I croak.”

“I remember you, Mr. Wolfe. I remember almost all the kids I meet; but I remember you specifically.”

“You do?”

“I do. You were such a little thing, not even four years old. You blew out the windows of my car when I tried to take you away from the hospital.”

My blood runs cold. “I... I did?”

“Mm-hm. It was the craziest damn thing that's ever happened to me. I thought there must have been a bomb or something at first, but no; only you. We were leaving the parking garage, and you didn't understand why you couldn’t see your mother. You were trying to unbuckle the car seat straps, and you began to have a meltdown. The next thing I know—boom, and the belt was unbuckled and you were climbing out the shattered windows. Of course I remember you.”

“I don't remember any of that,” I say truthfully. I don't even know what this means. Does she know I'm a magician? Does she know that magicians exist, or does she just think I'm some kind of super-human freak?

“I kept an extra close eye on your after that. A couple more strange things happened, but you calmed down after a few days and by the time you were getting placed in your first long-term home, nothing seemed unusual about you. At least, nothing unusual in an ordinary enough way that I could justify keeping you under serious watch without making people think I was insane. For a while, even I thought I might have gone temporarily insane.”

She pauses, as if she expects me to confirm or deny this.

I keep my mouth shut. One of the most serious laws magicians have is keeping our existence a secret from the mundanes, and I'm not about to bring the hammer of the Council down on this woman.

“Well,” she finally continues, sounding only a little disappointed, “I'm really not supposed to giving out this information in this way, but when I heard you were looking for it, I wanted to help, and I heard that you were pretty frantic to get more details about what happened. Are you working under some kind of time constraint?”

“S-sort of,” I reply.

“In any case, I'm always happy to continue helping the kids whose cases I handled after they've grown up. How old are you now, Mr. Wolfe? Twenty? Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-one; twenty-two in a few months,” I tell her. “I don't know my actual birthday, just that it's sometime in early fall. And you can call me Adam.”

“Okay, Adam.” I can hear the smile in her voice. “And how are you doing? Is life treating you well?”

“Um... I guess. Yeah, actually. Yeah, I'm doing well. I'm, um, in college. Community college. Still. I don't know what I want to do, really.”

“Oh, don't worry about that, honey. I didn't even go to college until I was thirty-two and already had two babies of my own. I remember feeling like I was too old to go back to school back then.” She laughs. “What I wouldn't give to be thirty-two again! I was just a baby myself. Anyway, I'm glad to hear you're doing well. That's always good to hear. But I'm sure you don't want to sit here all day answer my nosy questions, and I didn't just call you to ask them. I've got a copy of your mother's death certificate here, and the name of the hospital she passed away at. I've even found the cemetery she's buried in.”

I reel as though I've just been struck, and I need to sit down before I go toppling over.

“I—oh—can I... can I have that information, please?”

She laughs again. “Of course you can. I can send you a copy of the death certificate too, if you give me your address.”

“Yes; yeah, that would be...” Not great, obviously. Getting your mother’s death certificate in the mail can never really be considered great. “Uh, helpful. Really, really helpful.”

I give her the address of mine and Felix's apartment, and she gives me the name and address of both the cemetery and the hospital. I thank her again, and again; and about a hundred times more, but she insists that it was nothing.

“Can I ask—” I clear my throat. It feels like I'm trying to choke down a wad of cotton balls, and my eyes feel suddenly hot. “Can I ask what her name was? I mean, is her name on the death certificate?”

“I'm sorry, honey,” she says, her tone sympathetic. “They weren't able to get a name. Just the last name 'Wolfe', which they had to assume was her last name because its what you said yours was. She was already largely unresponsive by the time she arrived at the hospital.”

“What was it?” I whisper. “What was it that killed her?”

I hear the rustling of papers on a desk. “...Bacterial meningitis, it says here. It's not surprising it all happened the way it did; meningitis strikes quick, and often just looks like an ordinary flu until it's too late. If I remember correctly from what I was told back then, she collapsed in a grocery store. You were with her at the time, and you were both brought to the ER in the ambulance.”

“I don't remember that either,” I say hollowly.

“You were very little,” she replies soothingly. “You hardly even registered what was happening at the time. Most children at that age don't remember traumatic events clearly, just the general emotions; or small, very tactile experiences that were easier for them to focus on and understand.”

“Like the stickers.”

“Stickers?”

“A nurse took me around to all the nurses' stations and gave me stickers. I remember that.”

“Ah, I remember the stickers! You gave me one. I still have it.”

“Really?”

“It's right here on the cork-board in my cubicle, where I keep all the mementos the kids give me.”

“Thank you,” I say, and I'm choking back tears. “Thank you very much. For everything.”

“I'm glad I could help you out, honey. Then, and now. And I hope you find what you're looking for. You stay out of trouble, okay?” She says the last part sternly, and I know she's probably thinking of other kids who aged out of the foster system and didn't fare quite as well as me. “Stay safe.”

“I will,” I promise her, half-laughing as I wipe my nose. I've already experienced my far share of trouble, but I'm sure it's nothing at all like what she's thinking of.

Or maybe she does have an idea of the kind of trouble I've found myself in. At least, a little.

“Here, I'll give you my extension so you can contact me directly if there's anything else you need a little help with. And even if there isn't, check in anyway sometime, to let me know you're still doing well.”

“I will,” I assure her again. We say goodbye, I thank her for the thousandth time, and I hang up.

I look up, and find Robbie, the station manager, standing nearby, watching me with concern.

“Is everything okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I reply hurriedly. “Everything's fine.” I rise to my feet, still feeling a little light-headed. I look back at the pile of CDs I still have to sort and re-shelve. “Actually, Robbie; can I take off early today? Actually—you know what we talked about last month, about me taking some time off for a while for personal reasons?”

“Yeah?”

“Can that start today?”

Robbie raises his eyebrows at me. “What, like right now?”

“Like right now.”

“Er... okay. Sure. Why not? I'm sure it won't be—”

I don't wait to hear the rest. I sprint past him, heading out of the room, down the hall, out the door, and into the parking lot while I dial a number on my phone.

“Hello? Adam?” Felix asks on the other end.

I yank the car door open and throw myself behind the wheel, nearly dropping my keys with how badly my hands are shaking.

“The social worker called back,” I tell him, my voice less steady than I was hoping it would be. “I have the name of the hospital; and the cemetery she's buried at.”

I shove the keys in the ignition and the engine roars to life. There's a moment of silence on the other end of the line.

“Okay. I'll call Eleanor. We'll be ready to go by the time you get back.”

“Felix,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. See you soon.”

“See you soon.”