“Great. My great-aunt left me a magical humming box. What’s inside?”
“May I?”
I nodded.
She opened it.
Inside, nested in faded velvet the color of dried roses, were treasures. Rings with stones I didn’t recognize—one that seemed to shift between blue and green depending on the light. Brooches shaped like birds and flowers and one that looked distinctly like a human heart, anatomically correct and slightly unsettling. A tarnished silver bracelet hung with tiny charms: a key, a lock, a pair of clasped hands.
And a locket—oval, delicate, with a clasp so old it took Margaret three tries to open it.
The photo inside made my breath catch.
The woman looked like me. Not similar—likeme. Same dark hair, same stubborn chin, same slight asymmetry to her eyes that I’d always hated in photographs. She was younger than me, maybe early twenties, but the resemblance was uncanny.
“That’s her,” I said. “That’s Rosalinda.”
“And you.” Margaret smiled, but it was gentle. “Magic leaves marks. So does blood.”
Tequila jumped onto the coffee table, sniffing at the jewelry with interest.
This stuff smells weird. Like flowers and… something else. Something tingly.
“Don’t touch anything,” I told him.
I’m a cat. I touch everything. That’s my whole deal.
Margaret set the locket aside and reached deeper into the box, past the jewelry, past the velvet lining. Her fingers found something tucked into a hidden compartment at the bottom—a small scroll, tied with a ribbon that had probably once been red and was now a dusty brown.
“What is that?”
“A message.” Margaret untied the ribbon carefully. Unrolled the paper. The writing was old, cramped, and entirely in Spanish.
My Spanish was rusty—three years of high school and a lifetime of disappointing my abuela—but I caught enough of the first line to feel my stomach drop.
Para la hija que gira…
For the daughter who spins. The same words Rosalinda had said to me at that family reunion, forty years ago. The words my mother had hustled me away from.
“What does it say?” Cassie asked.
Margaret read aloud, her voice taking on a weight that made the words feel heavier than they should have been:
“To my inheritor: You have the gift of seeing possibilities. Every path, every connection, every thread of love that could exist—you can see them all. This is a blessing. This is also a curse. The gift will show you everything. But it cannot choose for you. That, mija, you must do yourself.”
The room went quiet.
“That’s it?” I asked. “No instructions? No ‘here’s how to turn off the parade of time-displaced ex and could have been boyfriends’?”
“There’s more.” Margaret turned the scroll over. On the back, in smaller handwriting, almost an afterthought:
“P.S. — If you’re anything like me, you’ve been running from this your whole life. Stop running. The magic only gets louder.”
Luna made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I like her.”
“I don’t,” I said. “She’s being very judgmental from beyond the grave.”
“She’s being accurate from beyond the grave.” Margaret rolled the scroll back up carefully. “Your great-aunt was acasamentera. A matchmaker. In her village, she was famous forit—she could look at two people and know whether they were meant to be together. She matched hundreds of couples over her lifetime.”
