13. The Red Mackerel #3
I laugh once, sharp and ugly. “Isn’t it?”
“No.”
“Mara and Caleb are dead.”
Her face tightens.
“Lilissa and Rafe almost died. Dorian collapsed in my kitchen after kissing me. Every couple I touched is standing under a spotlight I may have built.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know enough.”
“No,” she says, sharper now. “You know fear. You know guilt. You know half a curse and a handful of clues. That is not the same as truth.”
I stare at the wall of photographs.
Truth feels overrated. Truth has not saved anyone yet.
Mina steps into my line of sight. “Love cannot be protected by pretending it does not exist. If we do that, then the curse…whatever this is…has already won.”
The words hit harder than I expect.
Because that is exactly what I am doing. With my clients. With Dorian. With myself.
I look down at the banker’s box. At the folders inside. At the quiet, careful lives reduced to tabs and threat assessment.
My eyes burn. “I thought my gift saved people,” I whisper.
Mina’s expression breaks. “Oh, Fate.”
I press the folder to my chest. “Now I don’t know if I saved them or marked them.”
Mina reaches for me.
This time, I let her.
She holds me until I stop shaking.
The banker’s box sits open on my desk, full of files I almost treated like contraband. Love reduced to paperwork because fear convinced me folders were safer than people.
I wipe my cheeks with the heel of my hand. “I need to go to Dorian.”
Mina’s expression shifts.
Relief.
Then caution.
“Go to him and say what?”
Everything.
The word rises in me like fire.
The fish was clean. Your illness was staged.
The diagnosis was a red mackerel, which would be funnier if I were not actively unraveling.
The curse is listening. The walls remember.
My family buried warnings instead of answers.
I think public affection feeds it. I think silence does too.
I think I hurt you trying to protect you, and I think you hurt me doing the same thing, and I am so tired of both of us bleeding politely.
Also, I may be in love with you.
Possibly catastrophically.
Definitely inconveniently.
My mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
The shop seems to lean closer.
The beams creak overhead. The consultation room door settles in its frame. Somewhere near the front window, the bell gives the tiniest metallic tremor, as if the shop itself has drawn breath.
My skin goes cold.
Mina sees it.
“What?”
I press a hand to my throat.
The words are there.
So close I can taste them.
Speak it, and the curse shall feed.
Hide it, and the silence shall bind.
The curse’s language wraps around my ribs with old, intimate pressure. My mother steering me toward journalism. My grandmother’s fractured notes. The blank spaces in the Book of Shadows. Every D’Amour woman who chose silence and called it survival.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
Mina’s face hardens. “Can’t or won’t?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you tell him, what will happen?”
My voice shakes. “If I say too much in the wrong place, to the wrong wall, under the wrong painting, what if it gets stronger? What if it reaches another couple because I spoke?”
“And if you say nothing?”
The silence answers before I can. It presses against my chest. A tightening. A binding. A reminder that hiding has teeth too.
Mina looks around the shop, at the walls, the photos, the files, the place I built out of hope and stubbornness and magical matchmaking instincts I no longer trust.
“Then find another way,” she says. “Write it in code. Tell him outside. Use a circle. Use music. Use one of your ridiculous thread metaphors until the man finally catches up.”
Despite everything, I almost smile. “Dorian hates metaphors.”
“Good. He’ll know it’s serious.”
I look down at my phone on the desk.
One call.
One message.
One step toward him.
The thread in my chest gives a faint pulse, warm and wounded.
Dorian.
My hand moves before fear can stop it.
I pick up the phone.
Then the shop bell trembles again.
Not from the door.
From the air.
A whisper slides along the walls, soft as paper turning.
Weaver. Matchmaker.
The phone slips from my hand and lands on the desk with a dull thud.
Mina goes still.
I do too.
The silence tightens around me.
I understand then, with a clarity that feels like grief: this is the trap. Speak, and risk feeding the curse. Hide, and let silence build its cage.
Either way, something wins.
Unless I become smarter than the rules.
I stare down at my hands, trembling in my lap.
Not today.
Today I am exhausted, hollowed out, and still too frightened to gamble Dorian’s life against a curse I do not understand.
I pick up the client folders one by one and return them to the drawer.
Not packed away.
Not erased.
Protected, for now.
Then I lock the cabinet and press my palm to the cool metal until a ward blooms beneath my skin.
“I’ll tell him,” I say.
Mina watches me carefully.
“When?”
My throat aches.
“Soon.”
The word feels like cowardice wearing perfume.
But it is all I have.
Outside, evening light slants across the shop window, catching on the gold lettering.
Love Finds the Way.
I want to believe that.
I have built my entire life on believing that.
But as I stand in my own shop with the silence tightening around me, I feel the truth of the curse settle deeper.
And I choose silence for one more night.