Page 92 of Big Little Spells

“At some point, you will have to take responsibility for your own actions instead of continuing to punish yourself for the actions of a girl. Actions you can’t change.”

I nod miserably. But she isn’t lecturing me, I realize in the next moment. Because everything about her softens, and she pulls me into a hug I can feel down to my toes.

“My darling, you’re never going to move forward until you forgive yourself.” I feel her hand on my face. “All those recovery meetings and you should know this by now. You have to forgive yourself. To save anything, including you.”

I cast around for something to say, something to encompass all the grief and sorrow, shame and longing inside me, but all I can say is, “How?”

“Easily,” my grandmother says with gentle certainty. “Consider seventeen-year-old Rebekah as I do. A young woman who had wars inside her and did not know how to fight them. A girl who was never given the support she needed, even though I tried.”

“You should have been enough, Grandma. It was me who—”

“My dear, no one person can ever be enough. Not for a lost child trying to find her way. Your teachers and your parents failed you. The Joywood failed you.”

It’s the absolution I dared not ask for, and I’m still not sure I deserve it. But I want it.

Especially from her.

“Grandma...”

“I forgave you before you left,” she tells me, her eyes on mine so I can see what I always saw there in her gaze. Love. Always love, no matter what else might come.

“I disappointed you.” I can barely push the words out.

Her nod doesn’t help the tightness in my throat. “You disappointed me, yes. But love and disappointment aren’t mutually exclusive. Because I love you, I knew you could do better and be better. Because I love you, disappointment is only a starting point, never the end.” Her gaze seems to grow brighter now. “Forgive yourself.”

I would have said I’d worked on that for years. I did. But now I know what it’s like to see almost everyone I love turn away from me because they finally see the truth. “I don’t know if I can,” I say softly. “Or if I should.”

“You’re holding yourself to an impossible standard,” Grandma tells me. “Whoever told you love comes in absolutes?”

She points past me, and I turn to see what she’s pointing at.

But I know.

Nicholas.

He stands at the entrance of the cemetery, framed perfectly by the iron arch and the rising moon. He looks beautiful and unreal. Immortal, untouchable.

And he still looks like mine.

“Here is a man who’s run away from the consequences of his actions for hundreds upon hundreds of years,” Grandma says. “You could even argue that the greatest and saddest consequence of his actions is him. Do you blame him for this?”

The “no” is automatic. An intuitive response that requires no thought, because of course I don’t. I’ve already told him so.

“Here is a man who has hurt people for his own selfish desires, in his time. Who sacrificed everything for a drink of power and then learned, too late, that power only seems like a reward to those who have none. Do those mistakes mark him forever, Rebekah?”

I don’t want to answer, because I see her point. And I’m not sure I’m ready.

“Or,” continues my grandmother, right here beside me despite the fact she’s dead and I’ve failed her, “do you love him? Because he has made mistakes and those mistakes help make him who he is?”

I don’t want to use that word. Love. But then, it stands to reason that I would fall in love outrageously, the same way I do everything else. Why fall in love with some run-of-the-mill witch who works magic in accounting and likes to let loose on Beltane with a barbecue and an extra beer? That was never going to be me.

Of course, instead, I go and fall head over heels for an immortal who lurks around in his haunted house, lives for cryptic warnings, and occasionally looks at me like I’m the only sun he’ll ever need.

Not that I remember falling in love with him, exactly. There was that fire at Beltane, but all it did was clarify what should have been clear to me all along. I never hated him, I just hated that he was there that night. That he stopped the mess I made, after I’d already begun to make it. I never hated him, though I wanted to. I hated myself. The truth is, I’ve loved Nicholas Frost my whole life.

For as much good as that does either of us now.

“No one is ever perfect,” Grandma is saying in her quietly fierce way. “Not an ageless witch. Not the first Diviner we’ve seen in St. Cyprian in decades. Not Emerson or your parents or even me. There is no standard you need to meet, except your own. That’s how you put your mistakes to rights, Rebekah.”

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