Don’t want to be alone in the wold Bel Pierce did not want a baby. It was probably past the time when it was possible for her to carry one even if she did. While menopause hadn’t hit yet, and she’d heard of women taking potions to restore their cycles even after it had, she was pretty sure forty-four was too old to be dealing with squalling infants in the middle of the night.
Any age was too old to deal with that, really. She wanted none of it.
But she met David Price the Second last week. He had been at the DISCUSS office when she stopped by. Amelia said he didn’t so much as ask after the Derries or Jessica, and she hadn’t volunteered any information about them; she didn’t trust Two any further than she could throw him and Bel agreed with that wholeheartedly. Bel hadn’t talked with him at all either. She had never much liked Derry’s father, and while Amelia and Bel had deserved disownment, had done unforgivable things against the family, Derry hadn’t; Derry had just been the naive idiot Derry had always been, and she resented the heck out of Derwent for not recognizing that, for not fighting to keep his son. So she’d snubbed him and walked off without acknowledging he was there.
Seeing him there, though, Bel couldn’t get over how old he seemed. How . . . alone he was.
He left the mountain, left the New Hampshire Pierces, but he wasn’t a part of the Boston Pierces. He had no family, none at all. His family had left him and then he left what had remained.
Bel didn’t think that would ever happen to her. The New Hampshire Pierces threw her away, but the Boston ones wouldn’t. They hadn’t yet, anyway, even though she’d turned both Ben and Cole into toads on multiple occasions. She couldn’t imagine leaving them either, not forever.
Two had probably thought the same, and yet there he had been, looking as out of place in the DISCUSS office as a tropical bird in Antarctica.
She never wanted to be as alone as Two was now. As a rule, she wanted to punch in most people’s faces, but she’d come into the world squalling in fury because she and Melinda hadn’t fit down the birth canal at the same time. The worst part about being disowned had been getting torn from Melinda’s side.
It hadn’t been much more than two years ago when Melinda had urged her to consider children. When Melinda had worried about her being alone her whole life.
Bel didn’t think of herself as alone. She was more Berta than DP2. Berta had always had her family around her, had never been truly alone the way David Price the Second was. Heck, David Price the Second had had kids once and that didn’t stop him from being completely alone now.
But now Belinda was looking at the pre-teen scowling back at her, wrists closed in handcuffs after being caught magicking muggles’ wallets out of their pockets. She was a runaway juvenile delinquent from the muggle foster care system. She was angry at the world and didn’t know the first thing about magic despite being able to manipulate it for her own gain.
From everything the Boston Auor office could figure, the muggleborn kid was as alone in the world as David Price the Second.
She was eleven years old.
And Bel Pierce decided she was going to adopt her.