“I’m happy for you. Genuinely.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “You deserve this.”
Liam wandered in from the living room, saw me, and immediately tried to wander back out.
“Liam.” Cassie’s voice had that tone—the one that meant escape was not an option. “Come say hi to Diane. Get some coffee.”
“I did say hi. Earlier. From a distance.” But he came anyway, settling into the chair beside Cassie with the resigned air of a man who had learned that resistance was futile. “Morning, Diane.”
“Morning, Liam.”
He reached for a croissant, and that’s when it happened.
I felt something. Not saw—felt. Like a lens clicking into focus, like a radio finding the right frequency. There was a thread between them—not visible exactly, more like the afterimage of something bright. Golden. Warm. A connection that ran deeper than the binding that had originally tied him to this house, deeper than magic.
Something real. Something permanent.
And underneath it, wrapped around it like ribbon around a gift: certainty. His certainty. That she was it. That he’d waited his whole life without knowing he was waiting, and now the waiting was over.
“He’s going to propose,” I said.
The words came out before I could stop them. Liam choked on his croissant. Cassie’s coffee cup froze halfway to her mouth.Luna’s tail twitched from her perch on the refrigerator in what might have been amusement.
“I—that’s—how did you—” Liam sputtered, going red. “I haven’t even bought the ring yet!”
“But you’re going to.” I stared at him, at the golden thread I could somehow see-but-not-see. “Soon. You’ve already decided. You’re just figuring out the logistics.”
“Diane.” Cassie set down her cup very carefully. “What did you just do?”
“I don’t know.” But that wasn’t quite true. I did know—I just didn’t understand it yet. “I felt something. Between you two. Like a thread? A connection? And I could feel what he was feeling. The certainty.”
Luna dropped from the refrigerator to the counter to the floor in three precise movements, then hopped onto the table. “The gift is settling.”
“The gift is doing WHAT?”
“You made a choice. Committed to it. Really committed—not just said the words, but lived them. And now the magic isn’t wasting energy generating chaos anymore.” She blinked at me with those golden eyes. “It can do what it was always supposed to do.”
“Which is?”
“See. Rosalinda didn’t generate options. She saw connections. Real ones. Permanent ones. She could look at two people and know whether they belonged together.”
“And now I can…?”
“Now you’re starting to.”
I looked at Cassie and Liam again. The thread was still there—fainter now, like it was fading back into whatever invisible spectrum it lived in, but definitely there. Real. True.
“You two are solid,” I said slowly, testing the words against what I felt. “Like, really solid. Whatever happens, however hard it gets—you’re going to make it.”
Cassie’s eyes went bright. Liam reached over and took her hand, and the thread pulsed with warmth.
“That’s…” Cassie blinked rapidly. “That’s really good to know.”
“And Liam? When you do propose? Make it good. She deserves good.”
“I know.” His voice was rough. “I know she does.”
I foundMargaret in her garden that afternoon, doing something mysterious with herbs and copper wire.
“I can see things now,” I said without preamble. “Connections. Between people. Is that supposed to happen?”
