Esther went to her room and sat on her bed and contemplated what it meant that the curse wasn’t real. That it wasn’t a spell that made Eugene so sad, just depression. It wasn’t magic that bound her father to the basement, just anxiety. It wasn’t a jinx that drove her mother to the slots, just an obsession. For the first time, all the broken bits of her family and herself seemed fixable; curses couldn’t be broken, but mental illnesses could be treated.
