So I stayed. Let myself sink back into his warmth, into the quiet of our apartment, into the life we were building together one towel argument at a time.
The magical crisis would wait. They always did.
And when it was time to show up—with wine and commentary and whatever wisdom I'd accumulated from my own disaster—I'd be there. Not as the supporting character. Not as the comic relief in someone else's story.
As me. Diane Martinez. Main character. Love witch. Woman who'd finally learned that staying was braver than running.
It had only taken forty-seven years and one possessed phone to figure it out.
But hey—better late than never.
12
BONUS SCENE (MARCUS'S POV)
THE DAY HE KNEW. THE MOMENT HE STOPPED HIDING.
THE FIRST DAY
The shop was quiet. It was always quiet now.
Two years since Sarah died, and I'd gotten used to the silence. Built my life around it, actually—wake up, open the shop, sell antiques to people who mostly just wanted to browse, close the shop, go upstairs, eat dinner alone, go to sleep. Repeat until death.
It was fine. It wasworking.
The radio was playing Coltrane. It was always Coltrane, or Miles Davis, or Duke Ellington. The radio had opinions about jazz—strong ones—and in the thirty years I'd owned it, it had never played anything else. Sarah used to joke that we had the most pretentious haunted object in California.
I was cataloguing a shipment of Victorian mourning jewelry—appropriate, given my general outlook on life—when the door burst open and chaos walked in.
She was disheveled. Wild-eyed. Wearing yesterday's clothes and what appeared to be only one sock. She clutched her phonelike it was a live grenade, and she looked around my shop with the desperate expression of someone seeking sanctuary from something she couldn't name.
My first thought:The shop is closed. The sign clearly says closed. Can this woman not read?
My second thought, when I noticed her phone had stopped buzzing the moment she crossed the threshold:What the hell?
My third thought, watching her face shift from panic to confusion to relief as she realized the silence:Oh. That's what alive looks like.
I'd forgotten.
"What did you do?" she demanded.
I hadn't done anything. The shop had done something—or whatever Sarah had left behind, the residue of twenty-eight years of collecting objects that "hummed." But I wasn't about to explain that to a stranger who looked like she might shatter if I said the wrong thing.
"I didn't do anything," I said instead. "Also, the shop is closed."
She ignored this completely. Held up her phone, showing me a screen full of faces, matches, notifications. Started babbling about men following her, disco enthusiasts, someone named Greg with a leisure suit and strong opinions about cosmic vibrations.
"There's a man outside who keeps calling me 'foxy mama,'" she said, like this was a normal thing to tell a stranger. "He tried to pay for coffee with a Susan B. Anthony dollar. I think he might actually be from 1978."
The radio crackled. It sounded almost like laughter.
"Your radio's broken," she said.
"It's not broken. It's just opinionated."
"About what?"
"Jazz, mostly."
