Cade and Lilia's love and concealed parentage

Cade and Lilia’s relationship joins a love repeatedly interrupted by danger to the concealed truth that Cade is Ava’s father. For Ava, their bond first appears as a fragile hope that her mother and the man who feels like home might one day share a life; after the truth comes out, that imagined family becomes a reality whose long concealment has reshaped all three lives.

A Love Interrupted by Flight

Ava and Lilia spend her childhood on the run, returning to Currant only occasionally. Lilia sometimes slips back despite the danger to Cade, as though staying away were an effort she could not sustain. To young Ava, home is where Cade is. He is one of the few constants in a life organized around flight, and his presence has an effect on Lilia that Ava notices: her mother lights up around him in a way she does not around anyone else.

One visit becomes a weeklong refuge when snow traps them in Currant for the holidays. Ava is five, and the temporary safety allows the three of them to share the domestic warmth that their usual life denies them. Cade gives Ava new pajamas and shows her how to decorate a tree with popcorn chains and paper snowflakes, making a celebration from the ornaments he does not have. The scene does not establish that Cade and Lilia can safely live as a family; its force lies in showing Ava what their closeness might look like without the constant interruption of escape.

For Ava, the wish that her mother and Cade would have a happy ending is also a way of imagining a father. Lilia’s affection for Cade and the gentleness of their shared moments make that possibility emotionally compelling, even when Ava believes the facts rule it out. Their love is therefore presented through both intimacy and absence: the family can briefly gather, but cannot remain gathered.

Protection as a Barrier

Lilia refuses to let longing determine where they live. When Ava asks why they cannot stay with Cade, Lilia first points to the practical danger of his bookstore and cabin: they are full of books, and paper burns readily. She then explains the deeper obstacle. Even if they took care, living with Cade would put him in danger; she believes he deserves to live fully and will not expose him merely to make herself and Ava happier.

Lilia’s fingers close around the small silver heart-and-star necklace as she explains the choice, a gesture that accompanies the pain beneath her reasoning. Ava argues that Cade should be allowed to decide whether to take the risk. Lilia answers that sometimes a person must be protected from his own choices, and that even their occasional visits are dangerous. Her decision is not presented as a lack of love for Cade, but as love expressed through withholding a shared life she believes could endanger him.

She nevertheless gives Ava a future to hope for. Lilia says that nothing lasts forever, not even the Coterie or Venus, and allows that they might someday stop running and live with Cade. Ava invests that promise with all the force of a childhood wish. Looking back, she describes it as a faerie wish that came true at too high a cost. The eventual fulfillment therefore does not erase the danger that made Lilia’s refusal necessary or the losses attached to the family’s long separation.

Concealed Parentage and Its Cost

Ava’s childhood understanding of Cade as a possible father is contradicted by what she knows about the timeline. She has seen photographs from the first time he met her, when she was two, and believes he had not seen Lilia for almost three and a half years before then. On that arithmetic, he cannot be her biological father. She knows the dates do not work, yet finds comfort in imagining him as a father rather than picturing an unknown stranger.

The truth later unsettles that settled account. Ava has no birth certificate, only Lilia’s word about when she was born. Cade likewise realizes that he does not know her birthday and that she might already be eighteen. He says Lilia never lied to him outright, though she did hide things. The distinction captures the damage of the concealment: their relationship was not built on a false appearance of affection, but an essential fact about their family was kept from Cade, leaving him unable to understand the full stakes of his attachment to Ava.

When Ava and Cade confront what the revelation means, she admits that she had hoped he and Lilia would find their happy ending. That hope has died along with other childhood dreams, and the change in their relationship feels surreal because she has thought of him in one way for so long. Cade, grieving the discovery that Lilia hid the truth, insists that she did not simply lie to him. Their different responses expose two losses at once: Ava must revise the story she told herself about her parents, while Cade must face years of love for a daughter whose parentage he did not know.

A Family Recognized at Last

The relationship’s resolution does not turn on a claim of perfect knowledge or an easy return to the past. It turns on recognition. Cade tells Ava that he used to hope for the same future she did, all the time. She calls him Dad, and his open, happy smile lets her recognize the expression her mother fell in love with. The moment brings the concealed family bond into the open, while preserving the grief of the years in which it could not be named.

Cade’s devotion to Ava had already taken the form of care: years earlier, when she arrived at his door drenched, cold, and grieving her mother’s death, he called her a half-drowned rat, ushered her inside, and wrapped her in a blanket. The nickname replaced the childhood name he had used before, becoming a familiar sign of their closeness. Only later does that tenderness acquire its full family meaning. What Ava had long treated as a wished-for father-daughter bond was also a bond of blood, hidden by the same protective choices that kept Lilia and Ava moving from place to place.

Cade and Lilia’s love thus shapes the story through an unresolved tension between closeness and safety. Lilia’s protection denies them the ordinary life Ava wants; her concealment deprives Cade of the truth; and the eventual disclosure gives Ava the father she had imagined while making clear how much the family has lost. Their relationship is both the source of that longing and the reason its fulfillment carries such a cost.