Page 60 of Truly Madly Magically

“Well, it took something like two hundred years to get there, but yes. I’m sure.”

“I think what your parents did is probably worth being angry about,” I argue. “For eternity.” Because it wasn’t like my cursing. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t meant to help in some twisted way.

“Maybe,” Elizabeth agrees. “I used that anger as a crutch. Sometimes a weapon. If they hadn’t cursed me, Zachariah might have listened to me and not gone on his fool’s errand. He might have stayed if we’d had a child, or one on the way. He might have lived. I survived the rest of my life on that anger. At them. At him. For what?”

I blink at that. I have a million for whats and can usually list them all without missing a beat, but I can’t seem to think of a one right now. Because at the end of any day...it isn’t the anger that gets me through, love it though I do. It’s my friends. My business. My mom.

Even my half sisters, if I’m getting soft about it all.

I prefer being angry. It keeps me safe, it protects me, but...

For what?

“I lived a miserable life, angry at a dead man I had once loved enough to defy everything my parents wished for me,” Elizabeth tells me quietly. “Then I crossed over and stayed angry in the afterlife. As if love was a lie all along.”

Something shivers down my back at that, and I remember that vision of Rebekah’s from long ago. Love is the only lie you tell, but it will claim you in the end. It already has.

Though what’s claimed me, I think then, is the love turned inside out. The anger I’ve made out of it and decided is my whole personality.

Ouch, Ruth says from her perch outside the windows.

Owl stew, I shoot back at her, but my heart’s not in it, and she hoots because she clearly knows it.

“I’m not unique, certainly,” Elizabeth is saying in that same quiet way. “Many of us can’t let go of what held us back in life.”

What held us back.

I don’t like how that feels either. This time I ignore the owl commentary.

“It has been so long,” Elizabeth says on a sigh. “What I failed to consider across all these years—because he died, I imagine—was that he lost something too. For the first time this evening, I suppose we acknowledged what we’d lost together.”

It’s like my conversation with Zander tonight. Acknowledging we weren’t alone in old hurts, in curses real or assumed, in anger.

I lie back on the bed and look up at the ceiling. “Maybe the Good legacy is just being mad. At everything. Forever.”

“Maybe,” Elizabeth agrees easily. Too easily. “But legacies are choices, Ellowyn.”

She floats over to me and perches herself on the edge of my bed. She has violet eyes like my mother and grandmother. She is a Good, her life marred by a curse. A particularly vicious one.

Now she’s a ghost who seems to know too much about me and the things I never say out loud, inexplicably here doing things a ghost shouldn’t be able to do.

Like rest her hand on my cheek and encourage me, without words, to sleep.

Which I do without meaning to, thinking about legacies, only to wake to the sun streaming on my face.

I sit up in bed, a little achy. Like I used muscles last night that I never do. I stretch a little, glamour myself presentable, then head downstairs, following the smells of breakfast. When I step into the cozy kitchen, I see my mother and Mina, hip to hip at the stove. It makes me smile.

I’m not saying I loved Mina from the start, or that my mother having a serious relationship after everything with my dad was easy for me. But I was an adult at that point and out of the house. It wasn’t my life or my decision to trust again, it was hers. And these days I love Mina like part of my family, because she is, but I don’t often get the chance to really think about the two of them as a couple. To observe them together, here in this home they’re redoing together, with their own hands.

They make each other happy. I’m not saying there’s no spark between them—I choose not to pay the slightest attention to the possibility of any sparks involving my mother—but what I notice is that they’re partners. A team. There’s an obvious, enviable contentment about them. The few times I’ve seen them fight, it’s something small. A moment of frustration that they always make up quickly.

I’ve never heard any shouts or seen any tears. They never seem to hold on to bitterness or start in with recriminations. As far as I know, they always talk it out.

Almost like you can learn something from these small failures and thereby avoid the big, systemic ones.

That’s not something I want to think about too closely.

Not now, anyway, because it’s not just Mom and Mina in the kitchen this morning. My grandmother, and her mother, sit at the kitchen table. Great-Grandma Good has shrunk down into a tiny little thing, violet-eyed and immediately scowling at my belly, but she’s still here. She’s still alive.

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