Chapter 3 The Matchmaker’s Inheritance
THE MATCHMAKER’S INHERITANCE
WHERE I DISCOVER MY FAMILY TREE HAS ROOTS IN ROMANTIC CHAOS.
By the time I made it back to my apartment, the lawn had been cleared.
No Jimmy Kowalski. No Greg from the disco era. No greaser asking about sock hops. No Brad in his neon crop top. Just Cassie sitting on my porch steps, looking exhausted, and Liam leaning against the railing with the expression of a man who had seen too much and needed whisky.
“They aren’t here?” I asked, slightly breathless from speed-walking six blocks while my phone vibrated like an angry beehive in my pocket.
“They can’t get through,” Cassie said, seeing my expression. “Margaret put up a ward. They’ve been circling the block looking confused.”
As if on cue, I spotted Greg across the street, peering at my building like it had personally offended him. He waved when he saw me.
“Foxy lady! The vibes are all wrong over there! Something’s blocking the cosmic flow!”
Cassie stood, brushing off her jeans. “She says they’ll keep showing up until we address the root cause.”
“The root cause being my possessed phone?”
“The root cause being your magic.”
I stopped halfway up my porch steps. “My what now?”
“Come inside. Margaret found something.”
Inside, my apartment looked like a supernatural intervention had taken place.
Margaret was in my armchair, surrounded by books that definitely hadn’t been there when I left.
Luna was perched on my bookshelf, tail swishing, watching everything with those unsettling golden eyes.
Tequila had claimed the back of my couch and was glaring at Luna with the intensity of a cat who did not appreciate interlopers in his territory.
There’s another cat here, he informed me. She talks. Out loud. It’s unnerving.
“Tell me about it,” I muttered.
Also, she called me ‘pedestrian.’ I don’t know what that means but I’m offended.
Luna’s ears twitched. “I can hear you, you know.”
Good. You were meant to.
“Children,” Margaret said, not looking up from her book. “Focus.”
I dropped onto the couch, dislodging approximately seventeen throw pillows I didn’t remember buying.
My apartment had accumulated things over the years—blankets I never used, candles I never lit, a bread maker from a brief period when I thought I might become a bread person.
I was not a bread person. The bread maker now held my mail.
“Diane.” Margaret closed her book and fixed me with those sharp, knowing eyes. “I need to see your great-aunt’s things.”
“I don’t have any of her things. She died when I was a kid.”
“You have something. Family magic always leaves artifacts. Think.”
I thought. My brain felt like soup—exhausted, overwhelmed, still processing the fact that I’d spent an hour drinking tea with a grumpy antique dealer while my phone did something it had never done before.
What did I have from Tía Rosalinda?
And then I remembered.
“There’s a box,” I said slowly. “A jewelry box. My mother gave it to me when Abuela passed. She said it was Rosalinda’s, that Abuela had kept it all those years, and now it was mine.
” I’d shoved it in my closet and hadn’t thought about it since.
“I think it’s in the back of my bedroom closet.
Behind the shoes I keep meaning to donate. ”
“Get it.”
I got it.
The box was smaller than I remembered. Dark wood, carved with symbols I’d never questioned—swirls and curves that I’d assumed were decorative. The kind of thing you see on antique furniture and think, “That’s pretty,” without wondering what any of it means.
It was also humming.
“Has that been doing that?” Cassie asked, staring at the box like it might bite her.
“I thought it was the refrigerator.” I set it on the coffee table, hands slightly shaky. “It’s been making that sound for days. Maybe longer. I don’t know.”
Margaret leaned forward, studying the carvings. Her expression shifted—recognition, I thought. Maybe respect.
“These are old symbols. Protection. Preservation. And this one—” she traced a spiral pattern on the lid, “—this is for inheritance. For passing magic down through bloodlines.”
“Great. My great-aunt left me a magical humming box. What’s inside?”
“May I?”
I nodded.
She opened it.
Inside, nested in faded velvet the color of dried roses, were treasures.
Rings with stones I didn’t recognize—one that seemed to shift between blue and green depending on the light.
Brooches shaped like birds and flowers and one that looked distinctly like a human heart, anatomically correct and slightly unsettling.
A tarnished silver bracelet hung with tiny charms: a key, a lock, a pair of clasped hands.
And a locket—oval, delicate, with a clasp so old it took Margaret three tries to open it.
The photo inside made my breath catch.
The woman looked like me. Not similar—like me. Same dark hair, same stubborn chin, same slight asymmetry to her eyes that I’d always hated in photographs. She was younger than me, maybe early twenties, but the resemblance was uncanny.
“That’s her,” I said. “That’s Rosalinda.”
“And you.” Margaret smiled, but it was gentle. “Magic leaves marks. So does blood.”
Tequila jumped onto the coffee table, sniffing at the jewelry with interest.
This stuff smells weird. Like flowers and… something else. Something tingly.
“Don’t touch anything,” I told him.
I’m a cat. I touch everything. That’s my whole deal.
Margaret set the locket aside and reached deeper into the box, past the jewelry, past the velvet lining. Her fingers found something tucked into a hidden compartment at the bottom—a small scroll, tied with a ribbon that had probably once been red and was now a dusty brown.
“What is that?”
“A message.” Margaret untied the ribbon carefully. Unrolled the paper. The writing was old, cramped, and entirely in Spanish.
My Spanish was rusty—three years of high school and a lifetime of disappointing my abuela—but I caught enough of the first line to feel my stomach drop.
Para la hija que gira…
For the daughter who spins. The same words Rosalinda had said to me at that family reunion, forty years ago. The words my mother had hustled me away from.
“What does it say?” Cassie asked.
Margaret read aloud, her voice taking on a weight that made the words feel heavier than they should have been:
“To my inheritor: You have the gift of seeing possibilities. Every path, every connection, every thread of love that could exist—you can see them all. This is a blessing. This is also a curse. The gift will show you everything. But it cannot choose for you. That, mija, you must do yourself.”
The room went quiet.
“That’s it?” I asked. “No instructions? No ‘here’s how to turn off the parade of time-displaced ex and could have been boyfriends’?”
“There’s more.” Margaret turned the scroll over. On the back, in smaller handwriting, almost an afterthought:
“P.S. — If you’re anything like me, you’ve been running from this your whole life. Stop running. The magic only gets louder.”
Luna made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I like her.”
“I don’t,” I said. “She’s being very judgmental from beyond the grave.”
“She’s being accurate from beyond the grave.
” Margaret rolled the scroll back up carefully.
“Your great-aunt was a casamentera. A matchmaker. In her village, she was famous for it—she could look at two people and know whether they were meant to be together. She matched hundreds of couples over her lifetime.”
“Good for her. What does that have to do with my phone being haunted?”
“You inherited her gift. But where Rosalinda used it to bring people together, you’ve been…” Margaret paused, searching for the diplomatic word.
“Avoiding using it at all,” Luna supplied.
“I was going to say ‘expressing it differently.’”
“She’s been on forty-seven first dates since her divorce,” Cassie said quietly. “Forty-seven. And maybe five second dates.”
I shot her a look of betrayal. “That’s not—I just haven’t found the right person.”
“Or you keep finding reasons not to,” Cassie said. “Di, I love you. But you’ve bailed on every guy who showed even a hint of being a real possibility. Remember the architect? You liked him. You actually liked him. And then you stopped returning his texts because he—what was it?”
“He pronounced ‘especially’ wrong.”
“He pronounced ‘especially’ wrong.”
“It was ‘expecially.’ Every time. It was going to drive me insane.”
Margaret and Luna exchanged a look. Even Tequila seemed unimpressed.
That’s a bad reason, he observed. I don’t even know what that word means and I know that’s a bad reason.
“The point,” Margaret said, steering us back on course, “is that Rosalinda’s magic was focused.
Directed. She saw possibilities and she acted on them.
Your magic is doing the opposite—it’s pulling in every possibility because you won’t narrow them down.
It’s trying to show you all your options because you keep looking for more options instead of choosing any of them. ”
“So the magic is… what? Punishing me for being indecisive?”
“The magic is reflecting you. It does what you do.” Margaret gestured at my phone, which had reached 1,312 matches and was still climbing. “You’ve spent years keeping every door open. Never committing. Never closing off paths. And now the magic has decided to show you exactly what that looks like.”
“It looks like a nightmare.”
“It looks like consequences.” Luna’s tail swished. “Magical consequences, but consequences nonetheless.”
I stared at the jewelry box. At the locket with Rosalinda’s face—my face—staring back at me. At the scroll that had apparently predicted my entire personality decades before I was born.
“So what do I do? Just… pick someone? Any of them?”
“That’s not how it works,” Margaret said. “The magic is showing you possibilities—connections that could exist. But not all connections are equal. Some are just attraction. Some are compatibility. And some…” She paused. “Some are something more.”
“How do I tell the difference?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it.”
My phone buzzed. And buzzed. And kept buzzing, more insistently now, like it was trying to get my attention. I pulled it out, ready to throw it across the room again—
And stopped.
The newest match wasn’t from my past.
No grainy yearbook photo. No disco slang in the bio. No powder-blue polo or leather jacket or neon crop top.
Just a man looking directly into his camera with an expression of complete bewilderment. Silver threading through dark hair. Reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. A face that was handsome in the way of old photographs—the kind of handsome that took a moment to register.
Marcus Chen.
My heart did something complicated.
His bio read: “I don’t know why I’m here. I didn’t create this profile. Please make it stop.”
And below that, a message:
Marcus C: Why is your face on my laptop. I don’t date. I don’t WANT to date. What is happening.
“Oh no,” I whispered.
Cassie leaned over to look. Her eyebrows shot up. “Who’s that?”
“The antique dealer. From downtown. The one whose shop made my phone go quiet.” I stared at the screen, at his bewildered face, at the profile that had appeared without him creating it. “He didn’t sign up for this. He doesn’t even have a dating app.”
He’s got nice eyes, Tequila observed. For a human.
“Not helping.”
I’m not trying to help. I’m making observations. It’s different.
Margaret plucked the phone from my hands, studying Marcus’s profile with unsettling intensity.
“Interesting,” she murmured. “The magic chose him.”
“The magic doesn’t get to CHOOSE for me. That’s the whole point—that’s literally what the scroll said. It shows me everything, but it can’t choose. I have to choose.”
“True. But notice what the magic did here.” Margaret tapped the screen.
“All your other matches are being pulled from the past—men you’ve met, men you could have met, romantic possibilities you brushed against over the years.
But this man isn’t from the past. You met him this morning.
The magic reached out to him specifically.
Created a connection. Without any history to draw from. ”
“So?”
“So that’s different. That’s the magic doing something new.” She handed my phone back. “The question is why.”
The phone buzzed again. Another message from Marcus:
Marcus C: I’m serious. Make this stop. I was married for twenty-eight years. I buried my wife two years ago. I don’t DO this.
Something in my chest cracked open.
Because I recognized that. That wall. That absolute certainty that love was something that had happened to you once and was now over. That opening yourself up again was simply not an option.
I recognized it because I had my own version. Different circumstances, same bricks.
“I have to go talk to him,” I said.
Cassie’s eyes widened. “Now?”
“He didn’t ask for this. He’s probably freaking out.” I stood, grabbing my jacket. “And he’s the only person whose presence makes the buzzing stop. If nothing else, I owe him an explanation.”
“And if it’s something else?” Luna asked, far too knowingly.
“Then I’ll deal with that when I get there.”
Margaret’s voice followed me to the door: “The magic showed you something new, Diane. Pay attention to that.”
I didn’t answer. I was already out the door, phone burning in my pocket, heading toward the only quiet place I’d found in this entire disaster.
The phone buzzed. 1,456 matches now. But only one that mattered.
Only one I hadn’t gone looking for.