“Because I want to protect it.”
“But it’s not protecting it,” Soraya pointed out.
“You know what.” Nora put her hands on her hips. “If you could just stop being right, that would be great.”
“Sorry. I’m wrong a lot. I’ve been wrong a lot with you, so it’s nice to be right for a change.”
“Wow,” Daisy said. “Soraya admitted she’s wrong sometimes.”
Soraya shot her a look. “I’ve been wrong about a lot of things for a very long time. Being able to admit that is really freeing. Maybe I’m wrong about everything now too. Maybe.” She sighed heavily. “I told Declan I can’t have dinner with him.”
“Why?” Daisy asked.
“Because of the apocalyptic sex.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Soraya, your sex did not burn the house down!” Nora said. “You just spoke a hard truth to me, so I’m going to speak one to you. The way you’re thinking about God feels narcissistic. I think—if God is up there—that he isn’t obsessing over every little thing you do every day. It makes sense to me that he would want you to love others and not be a hypocrite, not do harm, to be honest and to lift other people up. I really hope he hates it when people like your husband preach about him and then do all this awful, awful stuff to the people around them. But the only people who benefit from you being scared of every little thing are the ones who are invested in controlling you.”
Soraya looked away from her. “It didn’t feel like the wrong thing. Mostly. I got worried about it afterward, and then the fire happened.”
“I will grant you, I think we dabbled a little too darkly. I think there was definitely power at play in all of this. Our spell worked too well. But that has nothing to do with you and Declan.”
“You say that very confidently. Like you know the rules to all of this, and I don’t see how you can.”
“That’s what I do. I talk confidently and loudly to hide that I’m an insecure wreck, okay? But one of us has to pretend they know what’s happening, and neither of you are going to do it.”
“True,” Daisy said.
“Yeah,” Soraya agreed.
“We need to sort our shit out,” Nora said. “Because we can’t be afraid. We can’t be afraid of ourselves. We can’t be afraid of the future. Not anymore. We didn’t want any of this to change, but it did. So when the universe gives you a chance at a new life, you have to take it.”
She was just talking confidently, though. Because when she tried to imagine a new life, the only thing she could see clearly was the image of losing yet another person she loved.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Nora
I call forth my wild,
From the earth,
From the sky,
From the trees,
I call forth the sparrow song,
The song of the flowing stream,
So that they might flow through me,
I am in the wild,
The wild is in me.
—A spell for reclaiming your wild heart
Aggie was especially pleased that their inaugural tarot night would fall on Beltane. But that meant Nora, Soraya, and Daisy had some extra errands to run. Not that Nora minded. She needed distraction right now more than anything. Was it weird that not having Sam in her life was a bigger heartbreak than losing Ben? It made sense in a lot of ways. It definitely reinforced her instinct to keep Sam in that box.
