“Healed,” she says after a moment. She wipes her mouth with a cloth napkin and then wipes her eyes. She takes another bite of cake, then sobs again, covering her mouth. “Healed,” she says, coughing on crumbs.
I rub her back, fairly uselessly. She smells like buttercream icing and lavender.
“We don’t know what it means,” I say. “But Daphne says all the magicians Smith-Richards has … affected can do powerful magic now.”
“It’s just so hard to fathom.” She wipes her eyes again, smearing chocolate on her cheek.
I point at my own cheek, and she wipes most of the chocolate away, smiling to thank me.
“My Jamie…” she says, still looking shocked, “doing magic. ”
Simon has pulled his chair closer, too. “It’s good news,” he says carefully.
“Isn’t it?”
Lady Salisbury laughs, more tears streaming down her chocolate-smudged cheeks. “I genuinely don’t know, Simon.” She takes another bite of her cake.
Simon takes a bite of his, too. “On the one hand,” she says, “it is a miracle.
It’s what Jamie’s always wanted. It’s what we expected for him, once a upon a time.”
Simon smiles at her, hopefully. He wants this to be good news. I think he wants to believe that walking cologne ad is offering something real.
“As far as we know,” Simon kept saying last night, “Smith-Richards is the Chosen One.”
“By what logic?” I scoffed. We were sitting on his living room floor, eating peri-peri chicken.
“Well, we don’t know that he isn’t, ” Simon said.
“We don’t know that anyone isn’t.”
“We know it isn’t me.”
“All right, Snow, so everyone who isn’t you could be the Chosen One?”
He shrugged. “We watched Smith-Richards fix that guy’s magic. I never fixed anyone’s magic.”
“One” —I counted on my fingers— “you fixed the entire magickal firmament. Two, how do we know that Alan person was actually changed?
It could have been a trick. Or a delusion. Maybe there’s some sort of placebo effect.”
Simon stuck out his chin. “Your stepmum believes it.”
“She wants to believe it.”
Simon just shrugged again.
We kept arguing about it for an hour, even after we climbed into his bed.
（It isn’t a bed; it’s a mattress. I had to magic him up some sheets and pillows.）
“On the other hand?” Simon says now, still looking hopefully at Lady Salisbury.
“On the other hand…” She taps her empty fork on her plate. “Things that seem too good to be true usually are.”
“In my experience,” Simon says, “things that seem too good to be true are usually magic.”
Lady Salisbury smiles at him. She hasn’t stopped crying; she’s smiling through tears. She picks up the cake knife and cuts Simon a second piece.
I thought we’d brief Lady Salisbury, then head back to Simon’s flat to plan our next move. （And maybe to kiss. There was more arguing than kissing last night.） （Though it was all in the realm of good arguing: lying side by side, Simon almost lazily pushing my hair out of my face while he disagreed with me.） But Simon doesn’t seem to pick up on any of my hints about leaving.
We stay at Lady Salisbury’s table for hours, eating cake and re-examining the whole scenario. I miss Bunce’s blackboard. Lady Salisbury—she says we should call her “Ruth,” but I don’t think I can—isn’t an orderly thinker.
She jumps from thought to thought and back again. But at least she stays mostly on my side. Even after hearing the whole story twice, she still frowns every time we mention Smith-Richards.
“I think you’d trust him more if you saw him,” Simon says to her.
I snort. It would have been a scoff, but I was drinking tea. “He just means he’s handsome.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Simon argues.
“We need to talk to Jamie,” Lady Salisbury says. “We need to see him.”
“Agreed,” I agree.
Simon nods. “Why hasn’t he called you, do you think? I mean, you could hardly talk him out of following Smith-Richards now.”
“Why doesn’t anyone call their mothers,” she says with a sigh.
Simon looks like the orphan he is for a moment, and I must look like a similarly kicked puppy, because Lady Salisbury’s face falls. “Oh, boys,” she says, “I’m so sorry! I’ve spent my whole life with my foot in my mouth. What I meant is … If Jamie suddenly has magic, I’m sure ‘calling his mother’ is fairly low on his list of priorities. He probably doesn’t want me to rain on his parade, if he’s feeling good about things.”