The Unfortunate Side Effects of Heartbreak and Magic
Breanne Randall
For GG, who always believed in me
To mom, who still does
And for Evelyn, my little daydreamer
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THE SUN WAS COLD, the teakettle refused to boil, and the wretched scent of old memories burned from the logs as Sadie Revelare built up the fire. Even the grandfather clock, which never paid attention to time, warbled out ten sad magpie notes.
A sign I must not miss.
Sadie threw the tedious old clock a withering look and kicked it at the base. It swung its gold pendulum as though wagging its finger in warning. Irritated, but not one to mess with the sign, she crossed herself with a cinnamon stick and then crushed it under her boot heel on the front porch.
Back inside, the house echoed its silence like a gentle reproach. Gigi had already left for the day. Seth had been gone nearly a year. Not that she was counting the days. She wouldn’t give her brother that satisfaction. She glanced at the toothbrush holder as she washed her face. One lone toothbrush.
Long ago, she let herself dream of her own house, a pair of toothbrushes, maybe even water spots on the mirror from a child brushing their teeth too close.
But her curse made that impossible, and she’d given up on romance too long ago for it to make a difference now. Some people needed flowers and pretty words. Sadie needed truth and kept promises. She finished getting ready, and on her way out the door, with coffee in hand, the clock chimed again.
“I took care of it!” she shouted back.
But on the short drive to work she had to swerve twice: once to avoid a snake in the road and another time to dodge the crow that nearly swooped into her windshield. She shivered. Portents of change and death, respectively. Still. She shrugged them off. Business didn’t stop for bad omens. Actually, it thrived on them.
The winding canyon road was in its full autumnal force as Sadie rolled down the window, the chilly air kissing her face. She inhaled the smell of leaves and mossy rocks and the promise of a sharp noon wind. But there was something else there too. River silt.
“No, no, no.” Her foot pushed harder against the pedal as she rounded the last sharp bend faster than she should, and Two Hands Bridge came into view.
Despite the lack of rain, it was flooded. Only a little. But enough. Sure as sunshine daisies, it was the third bad omen of the morning. There was no more ignoring it.
Even townsfolk who didn’t believe in magic knew what a flooding meant: someone was about to return.
She slowed down, her tires sluicing through the muddy water, her knuckles white against the steering wheel.
Cindy McGillicuddy, a neighbor from a few doors over, slowed down as she approached in her four-by-four truck, the back weighed down with a dozen bales of hay for the horses she kept. She rolled down her window and then pointed at the bridge.
“River flooded,” Cindy said knowingly. She was a no-nonsense kind of woman, her six-foot frame built with solid farmwork muscle. And even she was worried about the flooding.
“I know.” Sadie sighed.
“Maybe your brother is coming back, huh?” Cindy said hopefully. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
Sadie forced herself to smile, even though it felt tight against her teeth. Sure. Nice.
“Maybe. Either way, I’m sure everything’ll be fine.”
Sadie drove away, knowing that Cindy would spread the news far and wide. She took her duties as the town’s resident busybody seriously. There wasn’t a pie that Cindy’s finger wasn’t in, and if you needed help or information, she was always the first stop. She was a meddler, but in the way of a good fairy who secretly dropped off food for families that needed it or brought firewood to the elderly who were too weak to chop it themselves.
Everything is fine. It’ll be fine, Sadie told herself again.
Sadie hated that word fine. It was a Band-Aid, a sugar-coated pill to mask the bitterness beneath. Fine was what you used when it was anything but. But fine was what she had to be because if it wasn’t, everything would unravel. Sadie so often walked the line between who people expected her to be and who she really was, the lines blurred until sometimes she forgot who she actually wanted to be. But the townsfolk had expectations. And she liked to exceed those as often as possible.
Still, her fingers tingled with fear. Someone is returning.
Who, who, who? The question echoed through her head as she arrived at A Peach in Thyme, the café she owned with her grandmother. The day was still waking up, but her mind was already caught on the hamster wheel. The single word was like a constant drop of water as she started mixing up three batches of carrot-cake cookies with cream cheese frosting. The ginger would humble the eater while the carrots would take them back to their roots.