A long silence settled between us.
“I had a vision,” I admitted quietly. “In the Hedge. The circle wasn’t broken. But it was bent. I saw... something coming through.”
“I know,” she said.
Of course she did.
“I think it was Gideon.”
That stopped her, but she gave no twitch or flinch.
But her breath left her like she hadn’t realized she was holding it.
“Gideon shouldn’t be able to penetrate into the hedge,” she said slowly.
“Thenwhycould he?”
She looked at the box again.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I’m not certain it was him,” I explained, and she nodded.
“He’s good at manipulation and conning magical folks into believing he’s always around.”
The admission startled me.
“He does have a habit of making me paranoid,” I agreed.
I had never heard uncertainty in my grandma’s voice before, not like this.
She reached out and touched the edge of the shelf, not the box itself, but the wood near it. Her fingers trembled. Just once.
“Something’s unraveling,” she said softly. “And it’s touching places it shouldn’t. Opening doors that were meant to stay sealed.”
“And that message?” I asked. “The one that said the circle was bent. Didyouleave it?”
My grandma looked away.
“No.”
She didn’t offer a guess and didn’t need to.
We both knew what it meant.
It hadn’t been a warning.
Not from one of us.
It had been a signal or a mark.
The circle wasn’t broken.
Only bent.
But could that bend let someone in? Could it be the key to ending the curse?
“You need to leave this alone,” my grandma said suddenly, voice sharp in a way that caught me off guard. “This box, this history, it isn’t for you yet.”
