Chapter 2
DOVE
The church was suffocating.
I grimaced at the sheer number of bodies crammed together in a space that smelled of old wood, musty carpet, and about fifty different suffocating perfumes. Half the women here must have showered in them before arriving.
Too many hands belonging to too many strangers dabbed at their eyes with tissues, reciting too many prayers for a woman who had never prayed a day in her life.
My eyes went immediately to the photo of my grandmother, Margaret—never-call-me-Grandma—perched on a wrought-iron frame. Her eyes, cheerful and full of life, stared out at us in the congregation, and I dug my nails into my palms as renewed anger washed through me.
She would have hated this.
"Margaret Porter was a woman of kindness and great wisdom, a pillar of strength to those who knew her.
" The priest’s voice was droll and heavy as he stood at the dais, his eyes solemn as he looked toward the coffin, adorned with an over the top lilly arrangement.
Never mind that she was allergic to lillies.
"We commend her soul to the Lord, knowing she has found eternal peace in His embrace. .."
I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted blood. I winced, but the anger in my veins only burned hotter as I scowled up at the robed moron.
Margaret never wanted peace. Hell, she didn’t even know the definition of the word.
Margaret was life and laughter, noise and color.
Her wish had been fireworks. She wanted to be cremated and have her ashes shot out over the Pacific Ocean so she could mix salt with sand and become part of the earth once more. She had wanted exactly what she had given her late wife, Diana. A proper send off.
She didn’t want this.
She didn’t want hushed whispers and sobbing from strangers, church bells tolling in the background like some tragic soundtrack to a period drama.
Would she think less of me for not having fought harder?
Heat crawled up my neck. Shame.
A loud cough startled me, and I cringed in annoyance, scanning the room with sharp, judgmental eyes. A sea of black-clad figures, yet another fuck you to Margaret, who had wanted people in vibrant colors.
I tried to pick out the people who actually knew her.
My mother sat perfectly still beside me, her spine ramrod straight, as if someone had shoved a pole up her ass. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, her dark bob sleek and sharp, not a hair out of place. Her features were stoic, unreadable.
She hadn’t shed a single tear.
I hadn’t really expected her to.
But I had already used up my packet of tissues and had moved on to my sleeves.
They had never been close. They existed like two opposing forces, each always trying—and failing—to bend the other into submission. Like two north-facing magnets, forever repelling one another.
My mother believed in practicality, logic, and structure. Margaret believed in chaos, magic, and knowing things before they happened.
The divide between them had been apparent to me from a young age. Vast and unbridgeable, like a canyon. Now, with Margaret gone, I wasn’t sure if my mother felt relief or loss.
Maybe both.
Ida sat beside me, her head bowed and eyes closed as she endured the facade.
I knew her true feelings—hell, she had tried to help me fight Bill on it.
We had both failed, yet I knew she ached even more than I did.
She had loved Margaret with all her heart, just as she had loved Diana.
Now she had lost them both. My gaze shifted to Uncle Bill, and a familiar anger flared as I caught the self-satisfied smirk tugging ever so slightly at the corners of his mouth, his pudgy hands clasped in exaggerated reverence.
To an outsider, he might have looked like the grieving son of a beloved mother.
But I knew better.
He had been furious when he found out that Margaret’s Mystique had been left to me.
The shop my grandmother had built from the ground up at just twenty.
She had started small, traveling with carnivals and psychic fairs before growing Margaret’s Mystique into a brick-and-mortar business where people sought her out, paying for card readings and messages from the dead.
Somewhere along the way, she had become a celebrity medium.
But she had never let go of her shop.
And now, it was mine, along with the apartment she owned above it.
Pride surged through me at the thought. She had chosen me. She had trusted me to carry on her legacy.
I had spent years with her, after all. While my mother had been busy chasing her career, I had been offloaded onto Margaret more often than not, but I had never minded.
I had always been in awe of her.
She had taught me the cards, the crystals. I knew them like the back of my hand, lived and breathed them with intention, just as she had taught me.
But I wasn’t a medium.
Not like her.
Not like Ida and Diana. The three of them had found each other years ago and built a family out of nothing, loving one another—and me—as fully and as equally as they could.
Now it was just Ida and me at the store.
Uncle Bill cleared his throat and dabbed at his dry, untouched eyes. I narrowed mine.
He had fought Margaret’s wishes, of course.
Yelled. Raged. He had called it unfair. That as her only son, he should have been the one to decide the shop’s fate.
That it should be sold, the money split between him and my mother.
That I was too young, too irresponsible, and that I would run Margaret’s empire into the ground.
That Ida should have nothing.
But Margaret had been too smart to fall for her son’s bullshit.
The clause in her will had been ironclad. If anyone contested her wishes, they would forfeit their inheritance entirely.
Uncle Bill was an asshole, but he wasn’t an idiot.
This funeral was his revenge. This stupid church ceremony I had fought him on tooth and nail. Until my mother—without even glancing up from the email she had been furiously typing—had stepped in to compromise.
Uncle Bill got his church ceremony.
But Margaret would still be cremated.
The discussion of what would happen to her ashes had yet to take place.
My eyes drifted back to the photo above the coffin, drawn to the mischievous grin she wore, her full lips curved, her eyes crinkled at the edges. She looked older than I remembered, even in the picture, but she was so vibrant.
So alive.
Her gray-streaked hair was loose and wild, the way she always wore it.
Pain stuttered through my chest.
“Margaret was a loving mother, adored and remembered by her two children today, Bill and Georgia.” The priest gestured toward them, and my mother shifted almost imperceptibly, discomfort rolling off her in waves. Bill, of course, smiled solemnly.
I had to resist the urge to scoff at the priest’s words.
Adored by her children?
If anything, Margaret’s relationship with them had been more of a cold war than anything maternal.
"They just don’t get it, Dovey," Margaret had murmured to me one day in the shop as I dusted the crystal displays. "Not all minds are equipped with the understanding that there is more out there than what society feeds you. It skipped them, I’m afraid."
"What did?" I had asked tentatively, soaking in the wisdom in her voice, the somber glint in her eyes.
"The magic," she had murmured sadly before her eyes brightened. "Thankfully, the universe saw fit to rectify that with you."
“Margaret’s life was one of great service to her Lord and community…”
A small, disbelieving sound escaped me as I nearly gaped at the clueless man on the dais.
Ida’s lips warred with a smirk.
Service?
Margaret had read fortunes in the back of her dimly lit shop, communicated with the dead, flirted with anyone who had two legs, drank whiskey with her breakfast, and never gave a single fuck about what anyone thought of her.
I glanced at Uncle Bill, my lips thinning.
He sure as shit wrote this little spiel.
“May she rest in eternal peace.”
The final words echoed through the church, and something heavy settled in my chest as dreadful organ music began to play. The suited funeral directors moved up the aisle to collect her coffin, ready to take it to wherever she was being cremated.
I needed to find out what was happening with her ashes.
I fully intended to see her wishes through and scatter her ashes, but I highly doubted Uncle Bill would bother traveling to the West Coast like she had asked.
The wooden pews creaked as people got to their feet, and I watched with tear-filled eyes as the pine box was wheeled past, somber-faced men in suits guiding it forward. The shiny badges on their chests caught the dim light, the name Crestwater Funeral Home standing out in bold black print.
Margaret was leaving.
But not the way she had wanted to.
My eyes followed the coffin down the aisle until it was out of sight. I sniffed, swallowing deeply as I turned my head back toward her beautiful portrait, desperate to burn her image into my memory and hold it there forever.
I vividly felt Ida’s hand on my back and I had a half second of comfort flood me and fill that gaping hole of loss that was gnawing at me, and had been since Margaret took her last breath.
I tried to ignore the fact that I would never see her in front of me again. That I would never sit across from her, hands clasped over a spread of tarot cards, never read the astrology section of the newspaper together in the breakfast nook of her apartment.
Hands touched my shoulders, accompanied by murmured condolences I barely registered. One by one, they moved on, drifting toward my mother, who handled them all like clients she needed to placate.
"You know, I hadn’t seen her in ten years, but when I saw the notice in the paper..."
"What’s happening with her shop?"
"She must be loaded after all those celebrity appearances, eh?"
I grimaced. But I could hear Margaret’s voice in my head, low and knowing, full of deep laughter and wisdom.