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Flora’s face falls.

“No, I mean… Obviously I spent months chasing the value out of it, but now it feels…” I look down at the phone in my hand, at the open Whisp messaging center. “I don’t know. Wrong.”

Flora watches me for a moment before she looks out to the city. “I refunded it because the spell is over.”

Something in my chest tightens.

“You don’t need it anymore. You never did.” Flora breathes in slowly, and for maybe the first time since I met her, she looks nervous. “I don’t believe in magic.”

A startled sound catches between my throat and my chest, half laugh and half choke. Of course this is where she starts.

“Sorry.” I press my lips together and make a small motion across them, as if physically sealing them might help. “Go on.”

“I don’t believe that lighting a candle changes what happens to you, or that the moon decides who you’re supposed to love. I don’t think the universe puts people in our path because there’s some plan we’re supposed to figure out.” She pauses, and I can see her gathering the next thought before she says it. “But I do believe in attention. I think I always have, even before I knew how to explain it.”

Her gaze drifts past me to the lit up city again.

“That is what the spells I sell are supposed to do. Not change anyone’s life. Just make people stop long enough to look at it. To notice what was already there, what they wanted, what they kept reaching for. Because I think sometimes we know those things long before we’re willing to admit that we know them.”

She looks at me again.

“And then you showed up and made me realize I was very good at giving that advice to other people and absolutely shit at taking it myself.”

I smile, but I don’t say anything this time.

Mostly because I don’t trust myself.

“I’ve been paying attention to you for months, Merry. At first because you were impossible not to notice.” My mouth opens, but Flora raises one eyebrow before I can get anything out. “You came into the café and talked to me like we’d known each other for years, and you were funny and beautiful, and you made me nervous. I went home thinking about you when I had absolutely no intention of thinking about anyone.”

My heart gives one hard, painful beat.

“And then you kept coming back. You kept talking to me and telling me little things about your life, and then suddenly everything that you were doing or saying started to deeply matter to me.”

She takes a breath.

“And somewhere else, without knowing it was you, I was paying attention to you there, too.”

Oh.

Her eyes hold mine now.

“I knew the way you thought before I knew it belonged to you. I knew what scared you. I knew what you wanted even when you were still trying to figure it out. I knew how seriously you took everything underneath all the jokes, and how much you wanted to get things right.” A small smile touches her mouth, and it’s infuriating how breathtaking this woman is.

Flora’s smile lingers for a second before it fades.

“When I found out you were my customer, I thought that was the problem. That suddenly I knew too much and you knew too much, and there was no way to put any of it back where it had been. I went home and kept trying to separate everything again because that’s what I know how to do when something scares me. I put it somewhere contained. Somewhere I can understand it.”

She looks down at her hands.

“And then I realized that’s what I’ve been doing with my whole life.”

The humor leaves me completely.

Flora is quiet for several seconds. Someone passes behind us, talking loudly enough that I catch a few words before the wind takes the rest, and I wait until their voices disappear.

“I spent a long time thinking I was afraid of falling in love again because of what happened with Alison. But she wasn’t the thing I was afraid of. I was.” Flora’s voice gets quieter. “I was afraid I would do it again. That I would love someone so much that suddenly, one day, I was going to look up and realize there was nothing left that didn’t belong to the relationship.”

I want to tell her she doesn’t have to explain this to me. I open my mouth, but she continues.