"And the worst part is, I wasn't lying. It wasn't an excuse. Some part of me was relieved."
Grammy's face crumples.
"The story walked up and offered to carry all of it for me: his lie, my cowardice, Mirelle, everything. And I handed it over."
I can barely get the next words out.
"Because if it's the curse, then it isn't us. Nothing was ever mine to fix."
"Oh, my girl."
Grammy comes around the table and gathers me against her.
I cry into her shoulder like I'm eight years old. She smells like woodsmoke and beeswax, and her hand moves in slow circles over my back.
"That's what it's for," she says into my hair. "That's the working. It doesn't break hearts. It collects them."
She pulls away enough to take my face in both hands.
"It waits until you're most afraid and offers to hold your love somewhere safe. Then it never gives anything back." Her rough thumbs wipe my cheeks. "Look at me. I’m seventy-eight years old and I had one good night at an orc wedding, and do you know what I learned?"
"What?" I say through my tears.
"The book was on that mantel the whole time, and it couldn't reach me in that forest because I wasn't reading it." A smile pulls at her mouth. "I was dancing."
I laugh, remembering Grammy the morning after her night with Torgan’s grandfather, and I sob at the same time, which is an ugly thing, but Grammy has seen me with chickenpox. We are past dignity at this point.
"It's a story, Lissy," she says. "A real one. Older than all of us and hungrier. But it's still a story, and stories only rule the people who keep reading them."
"Noemi said it can't be broken."
"I saidIcan't break it," Noemi says quietly. She has come back from wherever she went. Her eyes are red-rimmed but steady. “Counter-craft can’t. That’s not the same thing.”
“Then can we burn the book?” I ask hopefully.
“No.” Noemi’s answer comes immediately. “The book is the anchor, but the working already lives in every Sunfell woman who knows the story. Burning the binding could drive it deeper into the family line.”
My stomach twists. “So what do we do with it?”
“Close it. Seal it. Stop reading it, telling it, and teaching it to another girl.” She looks down at the illustrations on the page. “We starve it.”
She looks at the book, then at me.
“It eats belief. Generations of it.” Her mouth tilts, not quite a smile. “But I’ve never met a spell that could force a woman to keep believing something after she’d truly decided to stop.”
The three of us look at the open book. In the illustration, the seamstress bows her head the way she has my entire life.
For the first time in thirty-two years, I don’t see a warning.
I see a woman who turned her own wound into a story and handed it down to us.
No.
This is what happened to her.
It doesn’t have to happen to me.
Somewhere, Caden is fighting magic to get back to his true love. And somewhere else, on the steps where I left him, is a male I told I didn't know if I could love.
