"I don't know," Noemi says gently.
I look at her.
"That's the honest answer. Grief-craft is strongest at making its own curse: fear, retreat, and the choice not to try." She taps the edge of the page, careful not to touch the ink.
Grammy has stood through all of this with her arms folded and her face closed like a shop after dark. Now she pulls out the chair across from me and sits heavily. She reaches across the table and takes both my hands.
"His name was Aldric," she says.
I startle. I don’t want to hear this.I don’t want to hear this."Grammy?—"
"You'll sit and hear it, because I should have told you long ago."
Her thumbs press over my knuckles.
"He was a journeyman glazier. He set the chapel windows the spring I turned twenty-four. He asked me to walk out with him every Sunday, and I wanted to say yes so badly I practiced it into my pillow."
Her eyes stay dry.
Her voice doesn't.
"And every Sunday, I told him no. My mother read me that book, same as hers read it to her. I did what frightened girls do. Better a whole heart alone than a broken one caught wanting."
She looks down at our hands.
"He set his last window in June and moved on with the guild. I married your grandfather two years later."
Something must cross my face, because she pinches my knuckle, a wry smile on her face.
“Don’t you make that face. I loved your grandfather. We had six good years, and I’d take every one again. Those years gave me your mother, and she gave me you.”
Grammy's grip tightens.
"But I never stopped wondering. When I lost your grandfather, I went mad with grief. I fled because it felt asthough the curse would never leave me. I lost my world. That's what the book took from me. Not Aldric. The knowing. It left me the wondering, and wondering doesn't die. It only gets quieter."
She looks at the book lying open beneath the lamp.
"I taught you the warning." Her mouth shakes once. "I thought I was keeping you safe. I was only keeping you fed to it."
Noemi has gone still and small in her chair, one hand pressed flat against her chest.
She's somewhere else.
Some locked room of her own.
"I told him it was the curse," I say.
Grammy frowns. "Told who?"
"Torgan." His name hurts to say. "Last night, on his own steps. He kept one terrible thing from me for months. I kept back the question I was afraid to ask. When it all came apart, I stood there and told him maybe the curse was real. Maybe this was what it looked like when it came."
My eyes burn.
"And I left him standing there."
The tears come.
I cover my face and stop trying to hold them back.
