Gizelle let her legs unfold before her and drew all of the paper into a tidy pile in front of her. “Thank you,” she said to Scarlet sincerely.
Some of Scarlet’s icy anger thawed into sorrow. Sorrow for Gizelle. “I’m sorry I didn’t have better news for you. More answers. Happier answers. Especially at Christmas.”
Gizelle smiled slowly, looking between Conall, who was clearly holding his elk back from a useless trampling rampage in her defense, and Scarlet. “You don’t have to feel bad for me,” she said reassuringly. “I’m glad. I know now. I know my parents loved me.”
“You don’t feel cheated?” Conall asked, clearly feeling cheated for her. “You spent your childhood in a cage.”
“I didn’t,” Gizelle insisted. “I wasn’t really Gizelle then; I didn’t have to be. I was only a gazelle.” She shared her wordless gratitude for that with her gazelle, and closed her eyes to share a soft nosebump in her mind.
Gizelle opened her eyes and looked at Conall. “I wouldn’t trade having some sort of normal childhood to possibly not have you, to not have this place, and this life.”
Conall made a little indecipherable noise and squeezed her hand more tightly than ever. Gizelle could hear his elk snort, but it was a settled sort of snort. They are ours forever forward, the elk told Conall, calming. They are ours now.
“Wait,” Gizelle said, suddenly recognizing something else. “Wait, you said when I was born.”
“August third,” Scarlet said with a nod. “You’re twenty-eight years old.”
Gizelle slowly grinned. “I have a birthday! It will be like Christmas twice but just for me!”
Conall laughed at that, a relieved laugh, and Scarlet smiled and even gave a little chuckle.
“Do you want us to call you Jessica?” Scarlet offered, standing and brushing imaginary wrinkles from her skirt.
Gizelle shook her head. “Jessica and I started the same,” she tried to explain. “Just like our names start with the same sound. But we’re different people now. I’m Gizelle. There’s... not a lot of me if you count thi
ngs by linear memory, but this is the me that I am. She would have been someone very different.”
Scarlet nodded her acceptance briskly, but her eyes were soft and kind. “Very well.” With a nod, she turned to leave, then paused.
Her gaze was all for Conall then, and it was much less soft and kind. “I need a moment of your time, please. Privately.”
Conall looked at Gizelle, who met his gaze steadily. “I want to look at the pictures,” she said, giving him a smile.
He wanted to hover, Gizelle could tell, but he glanced at Scarlet’s complicated face and nodded. “I’ll be right back,” he promised, laying a kiss on her head.
Then Gizelle was alone on the porch, with photographs of her family.
She didn’t care about the papers from the zoo, shuffling at once to the pictures of her parents.
Her parents.
It was a dizzying idea.
She’d had a father. She’d had a mother.
Neither of them was well-framed in the photographs; the focus had been on Gizelle. Only half of her mother’s smiling face showed in the picture, and her father was looking away.
Gizelle gathered them up close to herself and hugged them gently. Scarlet had given her the best Christmas present of all, she was sure.
Then she thought about the shining piles of wrapping and bows waiting inside, and she wasn’t sure after all.
Christmas was amazing.
Chapter 56
Conall grinned at Scarlet as they closed the porch door. “I presume they came through safely?” His last gift for Gizelle would explain Scarlet’s secrecy, and her obvious irritation.
“Quite,” Scarlet said tightly.