But something kept nagging at me and I couldn't let it go.
Why had my parents been there? And what did "coven" mean in this context? It wasn't a word any normal church would use to describe itself. I'd only ever heard it tied to witchcraft, and attaching that to the people who raised me felt genuinely ridiculous. My parents had been a lot of things. Religious wiccans hadn't been among them, as far as I knew.
I set my phone down and picked the photo back up, looking at it again properly. My mom looked so young in it, her smile looser and brighter than most of the versions I remembered. My dad's face was smooth, unbothered, none of the tired lines that had settled in by the time I was old enough to really notice him. And the bird. I couldn't stop coming back to the bird. It sat on his shou
