The Escape Plan (Only Magic in the Building #8)
Prologue
Beckett
You know how some people feel like a specific thing? Like, how a loved one feels like home, a romantic interest feels like falling, or a friend feels like laughter?
Well, to me, my grandmother always felt like magic.
Growing up, she told my siblings and me countless stories about Irish folklore. She taught us to salute lone magpies to avoid sadness and to never disrupt faerie trees for fear of bringing bad luck.
She also loved stories about love itself. She often told one about a boy she’d once loved but ended up losing because the fates determined different paths for them both.
To this day, I’m still not sure how much of what she told us was true, but I do know that when Gran was around, nothing was ever dull or boring. She weaved a golden thread through our childhood, and many of my memories center around that specific feeling of magic she brought to the smallest of everyday situations.
A lack of ingredients in the fridge to make dinner turned into barefoot dance parties in the kitchen as Gran made pancakes shaped like stars and crescent moons.
My inability to concentrate in school, humming tunes to myself in the back of the classroom—and, as a result, being berated by my teacher for being “thick” and “an eejit”—led to the appearance of my first guitar in my bedroom, as if by magic.
It was an ancient, battered instrument, and I cherished it because finally , I’d found something I was good at.
I knew Gran was behind the gift, but when I asked her about it, she smiled, tapped her nose, and said, “What’s for you won’t pass you, Beckett. So if music’s what’s for you, make sure you hold on to it. Never give up on it.”
Like any good Irishwoman worth her salt, she had many sayings, but “What’s for you won’t pass you” was Gran’s favorite. She loved the idea that we don’t get to control our own fates, that life has its own funny way of working things out. That if something is meant to be, it will be.
And that’s how we lived, with her at the helm of our family ship. Chalking our circumstances up to fate and waiting for fortune to hopefully favor us. Times were often tough in our home, but when the going got really tough, Gran’s magic was always enough to make me believe in something better.
Believe that there was always a little magic to be had, if you just looked in the right places.
Last year, when Gran passed away peacefully in her sleep, her loss hit me hard.
And for a long while, it felt like the magic died with her…
Until I found myself in Serendipity Springs.