“Good for her. What does that have to do with my phone being haunted?”
“You inherited her gift. But where Rosalinda used it to bring people together, you’ve been…” Margaret paused, searching for the diplomatic word.
“Avoiding using it at all,” Luna supplied.
“I was going to say ‘expressing it differently.’”
“She’s been on forty-seven first dates since her divorce,” Cassie said quietly. “Forty-seven. And maybe five second dates.”
I shot her a look of betrayal. “That’s not—I just haven’t found the right person.”
“Or you keep finding reasons not to,” Cassie said. “Di, I love you. But you’ve bailed on every guy who showed even a hint of being a real possibility. Remember the architect? You liked him. You actually liked him. And then you stopped returning his texts because he—what was it?”
“He pronounced ‘especially’ wrong.”
“He pronounced ‘especially’ wrong.”
“It was ‘expecially.’ Every time. It was going to drive me insane.”
Margaret and Luna exchanged a look. Even Tequila seemed unimpressed.
That’s a bad reason,he observed.I don’t even know what that word means and I know that’s a bad reason.
“The point,” Margaret said, steering us back on course, “is that Rosalinda’s magic was focused. Directed. She saw possibilities and sheactedon them. Your magic is doing the opposite—it’s pulling in every possibility because you won’t narrow them down. It’s trying to show you all your optionsbecause you keep looking for more options instead of choosing any of them.”
“So the magic is… what? Punishing me for being indecisive?”
“The magic is reflecting you. It does what you do.” Margaret gestured at my phone, which had reached 1,312 matches and was still climbing. “You’ve spent years keeping every door open. Never committing. Never closing off paths. And now the magic has decided to show you exactly what that looks like.”
“It looks like a nightmare.”
“It looks like consequences.” Luna’s tail swished. “Magical consequences, but consequences nonetheless.”
I stared at the jewelry box. At the locket with Rosalinda’s face—my face—staring back at me. At the scroll that had apparently predicted my entire personality decades before I was born.
“So what do I do? Just… pick someone? Any of them?”
“That’s not how it works,” Margaret said. “The magic is showing you possibilities—connections thatcouldexist. But not all connections are equal. Some are just attraction. Some are compatibility. And some…” She paused. “Some are something more.”
“How do I tell the difference?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it.”
My phone buzzed. And buzzed. And kept buzzing, more insistently now, like it was trying to get my attention. I pulled it out, ready to throw it across the room again?—
And stopped.
The newest match wasn’t from my past.
No grainy yearbook photo. No disco slang in the bio. No powder-blue polo or leather jacket or neon crop top.
Just a man looking directly into his camera with an expression of complete bewilderment. Silver threading through dark hair. Reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. A facethat was handsome in the way of old photographs—the kind of handsome that took a moment to register.
Marcus Chen.
My heart did something complicated.
His bio read:“I don’t know why I’m here. I didn’t create this profile. Please make it stop.”
