7. The Matchmaker’s Burden #2
I never knew him. Only photographs. A handsome man with amused eyes and sleeves always rolled to his elbows, as if life was work worth doing.
When I chose Elias, Marcus did not rage at first. That would have been easier. He became calm. Helpful. Watchful. He was Elias’ best friend after all. He stood at our wedding with a smile so perfect I knew the curse had found a door. The best friend clause.
My pulse stutters.
A door.
Words are doors.
Silence is a trap.
Three weeks later, Elias was dead behind the apothecary, and there were claw marks across the side of his face.
Marcus confessed, then denied it. He claimed something had spoken through the walls. He said the town had demanded balance. He said if the Weaver claimed her own thread, every thread she touched would pay.
The room tilts.
There it is.
Not scandal. Not romantic dispute. Not convenient human jealousy made neat for a newspaper.
A curse using love like a knife.
I force myself to keep reading.
I do not know whether Marcus was a monster, a victim, or both.
That uncertainty is its own cruelty. I only know that after Elias died, the couples I had blessed began to suffer.
Illness. Accidents. Strange quarrels. A bride who walked into the sea and could not explain why.
A husband who heard his wife calling from inside the walls though she stood beside him alive.
A cold sweat breaks along my spine.
So I packed the ledgers and left the town. Know that living an ordinary life is not failure if it keeps love breathing.
The last line is written darker than the rest, pressed so hard the ink has bitten into the paper.
If Fate carries the full gift, do not let her believe love is harmless. Love in our line has always carried too great a cost.
The letter ends there.
No spell.
No solution.
No comforting grandmotherly postscript about cookies, weather, or how to remove curse residue from upholstery.
Just a warning wrapped in regret.
My grandmother chose love. Her mate died.
My mother chose safety. She called it practicality. And she survived.
I chose matchmaking. I called it purpose.
Maybe every woman in my family has been naming fear something softer so she could survive it.
The next section is my mother’s journal.
My mother’s handwriting is neater than my grandmother’s, smaller, tighter, every line controlled as if tidy script could keep terror from leaking through the margins.
Audra D’Amour — Private Working Notes
That title alone makes my chest hurt.
My mother did not “work” magic. Not out loud.
Not in daylight. Not where I could see. She baked, gardened, corrected my posture, clipped coupons with the focus of a woman performing battlefield surgery, and pretended our family gift was a charming hereditary inconvenience like weak ankles or an inability to parallel park.
But here she is. Working notes. Hidden in the attic. Waiting for me to become desperate enough to find them.
I turn the page with fingers that do not feel entirely attached to my hands.
Fate saw her first thread today.
My breath catches.
I remember that day.
I was seven, maybe eight, wearing rain boots with yellow ducks on them and a sweater that itched at the wrists.
We were at The Siren’s Cup before it was trendy enough to charge extra for foam shaped like emotional damage.
Two strangers were arguing near the counter—quietly, politely, the way adults do when they want children to think the room is fine.
I saw a red thread between them.
Not bright. Not easy. Tangled around anger and grief, but there.
I told my mother.
She spilled her coffee.
I used to think she was startled.
Now I read what she wrote: She described color, tension, and directional pull with accuracy beyond training. Full Weaver signs confirmed. I smiled because she was watching my face. I told her it was imagination because the alternative was fear, and I could not bear to hand fear to my child.
The attic blurs.
“Oh, Mom.”
The words break before I can stop them.
I keep reading.
I will guide her away. Journalism, perhaps. Writing will let her observe without binding. Questions without blessing. Truth without thread-work. If she must chase stories, let them be other people’s stories. Let her never learn how easily attention becomes invitation.
Journalism.
The brochures. The college tours. The way she praised every school newspaper article I wrote as if investigative features on cafeteria corruption were sacred texts. The disappointment when I mentioned a thread I had seen. The careful silence afterward.
I thought she did not believe in me.
No.
She believed too much. She believed my gift could hurt people, so she tried to make me smaller and safer.
A hot, childish anger rises fast enough to burn. “She should have told me,” I whisper.
The attic offers no answer, which is wise of it.
The next page holds pressed lavender and a photograph of me at twelve, scowling at the camera with a notebook under one arm and a fox cub’s tail flickering visibly behind me because puberty was a disaster for everyone involved.
Beneath the photograph, my mother wrote: She is fierce. Protective. Too emotional, her father says. He is wrong. Emotion is not the flaw. Emotion is the door. She will love people enough to move mountains and then blame herself for the avalanche.
I laugh once.
It hurts. “That is both rude and accurate.”
My mother continues.
If she becomes a matchmaker, she will not stop with safe matches. She will follow difficult threads. Broken ones. Forbidden ones. She will believe love deserves a chance even when history says otherwise. That is what makes her dangerous.
Dangerous.
There it is again.
Not gifted. Not special.
Dangerous.
I turn another page.
If Fate hates me one day for steering her away, let her hate me alive. Let her think me faithless. Let her think me practical. I can survive her anger. I cannot survive another grave.
The tears come then.
Quietly, which is inconsiderate. I prefer dramatic crying. Dramatic crying gives a person something to do with her hands.
This is worse. A spill. A surrender.
My mother’s retreat from magic had not been cowardice. It had been a shield. A flawed one. A suffocating one. A shield that kept secrets until secrets became weapons, but a shield all the same.
And me?
I broke through it wearing lipstick and excellent branding.
I opened a matchmaking shop in the town my mother tried to steer me away from.
I blessed couples, followed threads, encouraged impossible love, and hung every success story on my office wall like proof that I had chosen adventure over fear.
One client put me on Facebook and TikTok.
I flaunted my gift like no witch from bloodline before me.
Now I wonder, as I sit here in the attic, with letters and books piled on top of me, if adventure was only catastrophic disobedience with better lighting.
I do not remember calling Mina.
That is concerning for several reasons, not the least of which is that my phone is downstairs and I am still sitting on the attic floor with my mother’s Book of Shadows open in my lap and tear tracks drying on my face like evidence.
But twenty-three minutes later, my front door bangs open.
“Fate?” Mina calls. “If you are dead, possessed, or communing with vengeful wallpaper, make a noise I can interpret!”
I press both hands over my face.
This is friendship. It is awful. “I’m upstairs,” I call back.
A pause.
Then the sound of Mina’s boots on the stairs, fast and furious. She appears at the attic entrance in a yellow raincoat, hair damp from the weather, cheeks flushed from worry, one hand gripping her purse like it contains either snacks or a weapon.
Knowing Mina, both.
Her eyes find my face. The joking goes out of her. “Oh, honey.”
“No.” I point at her. “Do not honey me. I am one compassionate syllable away from becoming structurally unsound.”
She crosses the attic anyway, crouches beside me, and takes in the open Book of Shadows, the letter from my grandmother, my mother’s journal, the cedar chest, and the general emotional crime scene.
“What happened?”
I should not tell her. The curse wording rises instantly, sharp as a hook.
Speak it, and the curse shall feed.
But Mina is already in this. She went to the archives. She saw the vanishing text. She knows enough to be afraid, not enough to protect herself from what she does not know.
So I choose fragments. Terrible, jagged fragments. “My mother knew,” I say. “My grandmother knew. The D’Amour women have been running from this for generations.”
Mina’s face tightens. “The curse?”
I flinch.
Even that word feels too loud.
“The family problem,” I whisper.
Her brows draw together, but she follows the correction.…quietly. “Okay. The family problem.”
I show her the genealogy. The marks beside matchmakers who left town, stopped practicing, lost mates, vanished from records. I show her Grandma Evelyn’s letter, but not every line. I show her my mother’s note about steering me toward journalism.
Mina reads silently.
That is how I know it is bad. Mina fills silence like a professional. If she has nothing to say, the world has become rude beyond language.
Finally, she lowers the page. “Your mother tried to protect you.”
“She lied to me.”
“Yes.”
“Both can be true?”
“Unfortunately, yes. That’s why families should come with warning labels and customer support.”
A laugh slips out and breaks in the middle.
Mina takes my hand. “What are you thinking?”
I look away.
The attic window is fogged with rain. My reflection floats faintly in the glass: pale face, messy hair, old magic in my lap, the expression of a woman who has just discovered her purpose may wield a daggar.
“I think I should close the shop.”
Mina goes still. “Mated by Fate?”
“No, Mina, my secret underground raccoon laundromat.”
“Do not sarcasm at me while making catastrophic life decisions.”