Yet somehow, it just wouldn’t come together.
She couldn’t make it spark, despite how right she felt it was, and how much magic there was now in the air. It crackled around them. It made her hair lift away from her head. Plus, now there was a kind of humming happening, a weird humming that seemed to get under her skin and drown everything else out.
Popcorn was barking again, but she could hardly hear him.
He seemed very far away, very distant.
Jack, I’m scared, she wanted to say. But god, he was looking at her with such hope in his eyes. Such longing. “You can do this,” he said, so of course she couldn’t stop now, she just couldn’t.
She wouldn’t. She went to try again.
Only this time, he stepped in. “Don’t cut yourself out of whatever you write. Do it as though the original spell was yours,” he said—and he had to be loud now. He had to be fierce, because the hum wasunhinged. She could hear it in her teeth. It was making her eyes water.
And was that something clawing at the cabin?
Yes, yes, she could make out something. Of course she could. It was making the walls shake. It was making the roof crackle.The devil knows what you’re doing, her mind whispered, and it made her panic. It made her seize on what he had suggested, without even really thinking about it.
Her mind seemed to slide sideways.
She saw something clearly that she didn’t really understand.
Something grafted onto the original spell.The terms and conditions, she thought,the terms and conditions were grafted onto the original spell. They’re not real, they slipped into a space that was left, they can be removed. And then suddenly there it was:
May he be acted upon by no law but the one I first set, she wrote.
And no game show sound rang out.
Yet somehow, at the same time, nothing seemed to go right.
Because the horribleness didn’t stop. Nothing changed—except for Jack.
Jack, who immediately crossed the room and got hold of her face. He cupped it in his two hands, and turned it up to his, as the humming got louder and the ground shook and she knew, oh god, she knew she’d done the wrong thing. She knew it before he even spoke. Then he did, and it was worse.
“I have about thirty seconds, and I’m gonna use them to tell you that you must never think you did anything wrong. Never. I asked you to do me this kindness, and it is one, believe me, it is one,” he said, and she wanted to tell him to stop. She wanted to saydon’t say any more. But somehow she let him go on anyway. “Because I would sooner endure Hell for all eternity than see you suffer for even asecond. I swear to you, my only regret is that I couldn’t be the man you deserve, the man worthy of your love, the man I know you will find. Never forget you’re worth the world, my Nancy. My sweet Nancy. Oh, what it is to finally be able to say your name. Anything that now happens will seem like nothing at all, because I got to speak it aloud with all the love in my coal-black heart.”
And god, when he was done.
A thousand revelations hit her all at once.
But it was the name thing that really drove it home. It put a crack in her mind, and through it came a blinding, obliteratinglight. She saw it shining on a thousandhoneysandsweetheartsandbabies, all the way back to the beginning. All the way back tokid.Kid, he had called her.
Not her name, never her name.
He’d even told her what made things that way.I’m not allowed to say it, he’d told her, like a fucking thief, walking in to steal every single thing she had without even so much as a disguise. He hadn’t even done it in darkness. He’d done it in broad daylight, and she hadn’t noticed a thing.
“Oh my god. Oh my god. It’sme,” she said. “I’m the one you had to win.”
And he didn’t say no. Hedid not say no.
He said, “Of course it is. Of course it was always you. It was you who called me, even though you didn’t mean to. It was you I needed to love me. It was you, my Nancy.”
Just as that humming reached an awful crescendo. It splintered and cracked—or at least she thought it did. But then she felt the ground shift beneath her feet, she felt it slide, and somehow Jack was slipping away from her. His hands left her face; he seemed to stumble. She had to grab hold of his shoulders.
Then when they escaped her, she dug her fingers into his arms.
She held on tight as something dragged him down. Something she didn’t want to look at right now, she didn’t want to believe; she just wanted him to say that things weren’t this way, ten seconds before they all ended. “But it can’t be. Jack, it can’t be. Jack, you tell me it can’t be,” she ordered him. “You tell me you didn’t let me think you’d be okay if I broke it, when it didn’t have to be broken at all.”
He didn’t, though. He wouldn’t.
