“I suspected when you were fourteen. Confirmed it when I was seventeen.” Iris’s voice was barely above a whisper. “When I started studying curse-breaking.”
“Fourteen.” Ramona felt like she couldn’t breathe. “I was fourteen andyou knewand you just… what? Decided not to mention it?”
“I wanted to fix it first,” Iris said desperately. “I wanted to have a solution before I told you. I didn’t want to tell you something that devastating without being able to break it?—”
“That wasn’t your choice to make.” Ramona’s voice rose. “This is my life. My magic! My entire sense of self. And you just let me keep thinking I was the problem?”
“We tried to help,” Eleanor interjected. “The extra tutoring, the private lessons?—”
“That made me feel worse!” Ramona was shouting now. “Every ‘extra lesson’ was a reminder that I needed more help than everyone else. That I was slower, weaker, more likely to fail.”
The only sound was the gravel drive under the car tires as they drove up toward Greenbriar Manor. “We were only trying to?—”
“Save it.”
“Ramona,” her mother scolded.
“No, you don’t get to pretend like you’re my family anymore. Family doesn’t keep secrets like this from one another,” Ramona said, waiting for the car to stop moving before unbuckling her seat belt.
Iris turned in her seat. “I’ve spent my life trying to?—”
“You were trying to manage the symptoms without telling me about the disease.” Ramona’s hands were shaking. “Do youhave any idea what that did to me? A lifetime of thinking I was fundamentally flawed?”
“We wanted to protect you,” Eleanor said.
“From what? The truth?”
Iris sighed. The three women got out of the car. Ramona shivered in the darkness, then felt a warmth at her back, like Zara’s presence was directly behind her.
“So you just let me suffer instead?” Ramona almost wanted to laugh. “That’s not protection. That’s?—”
“It wasn’t supposed to take this long,” Iris cut in. Her voice cracked. “I thought I’d figure it out in a few years. Find the right ritual, break the curse, and then I could tell you. But the curse was more complex than I expected. The anchor tree is old, powerful. Every time I thought I’d found the answer, it didn’t work.”
“So you became a curse-breaker for the guilt trip?” Ramona asked. “Dedicated your whole career to it so you could blame even more things on me?”
“To help you,” Iris said. “Everything I’ve done — the specialization, the research, becoming an expert in curse identification and removal — it was all to find a way to break what was done to you.”
“And in the meantime, you just watched me struggle. Watched me get expelled from Thornwood. Watched my marriage fall apart. Watched me lose everything?—”
“Iconvinced the Council not to strip your magic,” Iris said desperately. “After the incident, they wanted to permanently bind you. I’m the one who argued for leniency. I’m the one who’s been protecting you?—”
“Protecting me from the consequences of a curse you knew about.” Ramona’s voice broke on a yell. “You want credit for damage control when you should have told me the truth years ago?”
“Ramona, please?—”
“Why did you do it?” The question came out quiet. Deadly. “Why did you curse me?”
Iris went white. “What?”
“We were children,” Ramona continued, biting every word. “Whydid you do this to me?”
“I didn’t know what was happening,” Iris said. Her voice was shaking. “I was a child, too, and we had just fought about something, and I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Ramona stared at her sister. Trying to see the truth in her face.
Through the tether: Zara’s presence. Steady. Waiting.
“I’ve found the spell to break it,” Iris said suddenly. “To break the curse fully. I’ve been working on it for years. I finally finished the translation last month.”
