Page 51 of Truly Madly Magically

He’s not done though. “That was the pattern. She’d get better, but then, if I even had a stray thought about getting away or talking to you about what was happening, she would have another episode. A Healer could help, but they could never stop it for good.” That gray gaze of his is heavy on mine. Steady, but weighted. “I thought I was cursed.”

All I can do is whisper his name.

“I was afraid to do anything wrong,” he tells me, sounding more resolute, somehow. “I knew I couldn’t go anywhere. What if something happened? What if I said the wrong thing, or did the wrong thing, and she was left here hurting? You have no idea how much I wanted to explain all this to you then, Ellowyn, but I didn’t know how. Not without hurting her more.”

I feel as if I’m spinning, but not because I feel sick. That would be the easy way out this.

I knew Zelda got sick, but I guess I thought it was a cold here, a flu there. The normal way people got sick sometimes, if not usually witches. I don’t think any of us realized...

But admitting that feels like it might be the death of me. “You could have asked me to stay.” I mean that to come out like every other accusation I’ve ever hurled at him, but it doesn’t. It’s quiet. Raw.

More telling than I want to admit.

I would have said yes.

“You didn’t want to stay here, and I didn’t want to ask you to do something I knew you didn’t want to do.” He looks at me then, over our daughter’s picture. Over our daughter herself, tucked up inside me. Over our hands threaded together. Over a past neither one of us can go back and change. “It wasn’t bullshit, Ellowyn. I fucked it up, doing it at prom. I fucked up, period, but I wasn’t lying. I wanted—needed—you to have what you wanted, even though I couldn’t go with you.”

I open my mouth to argue, even though there’s no argument to make, but he just keeps on.

“I know everything changed that Litha,” he says in the same rough, raw way. “You stayed here and you made it work, like maybe we could have. I couldn’t see that beforehand. The only thing I could see was me, being the anchor that drowned you.”

“We could have—”

“There are always going to be a million and one could haves, but I did the only thing I could. The only thing I could live with. I broke things off. I let you go. I let you hate me. I was determined to be as noble about it as I could. Until that night.”

Because that night, our Beltane prom night, I refused to cry in front of him. That night, I refused to do anything he expected. In fact, the only thing I could think to do was prove I didn’t need him at all.

By having someone else instead. One of his jock friends, so it would really twist the knife.

It didn’t matter that I went home and threw up after. That I felt dirty and wrong and like I was the villain, because in that moment, in my head, I won.

When Zander flew off the handle the next day, the way I’d hoped he would, I knew I was right. That I’d won.

I was so sure that was the only thing that mattered. For all these years.

Yet now I look back on it and all I see is loss. All we ever did was lose. He couldn’t tell the truth, and it was the only thing I could do, and all we really wanted was each other. How did that get lost along the way?

For a moment, all I want to do is cry. Right here in front of him, the way I never have.

But I won’t.

I don’t.

“It doesn’t end there,” he says, looking at our joined hands like he can sense the possibility of my tears. Or maybe he can feel the same thing I do inside me—that even though everything he’s saying makes me ache, I’m getting better by the moment.

“Every time I tried to tell anyone about the things Festus said. Any time I talked to Jacob about the rivers rising and all the imbalances we could see everywhere. If I dared make a case at a town meeting about the confluence being messed up. If I did anything, Mom got worse. Then this coven shit killed her.”

Suddenly I get it. All that guilt over the summer that I chalked up to him being a man, a Guardian, makes sense.

He thinks he did it to her. He thinks he killed her.

“Do you think her death is your fault?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

“She would have been disappointed in me if I didn’t stand up for what was right, if I let you guys go alone, so I couldn’t,” he says gruffly. “So they won. And I get to live with the knowledge that I could have stopped it by shutting my mouth, for once. By sitting down. By standing up for her, no matter what she thought of me for doing it.”

This past summer makes more sense than it ever did. The self-destruction, the drinking.

“It wasn’t a curse,” I tell him gently, and I know even before I form the words that they’re true, but I like the validation all the same. “A curse doesn’t leave you any choices. Look at me. At Elizabeth and Zachariah.”

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