The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Barbara Davis

There are all sorts of heroes, and almost none of them will ever have something shiny pinned to their chests.

I have always grieved the ends of things. The final notes of a song as they ebb into silence. The curtain falling at the end of a play. The last snowflake. Goodbyes. So many goodbyes.

Still, I find myself drawn to those scars, a map of wounds that takes me neither forward nor back.

It isn’t heavy in the physical sense, but the memories inside carry a different kind of weight, the kind that sits heavily on the heart.

When so much has been uprooted—so many things lost—one must seek comfort in rituals. Even the sad ones.

hold it in my arms, the way one holds a baby or a promise—close

For safekeeping, he said as he pressed it into my hands on that last morning.

yearning for a whiff of the bright, clean scent I’ve engraved on my memory. A blend of seawater and the peel of fresh limes.

Adieu, Anson, mon amour. C’est la fin.

Dr. Matthew Edward Huxley—Hux

Rory

Camilla Lowell Grant.

It was the type of scandal from which most society wives never quite recovered, a cliché of the most delicious and disastrous variety, but for Camilla, it became the crown jewel in her collection of betrayals, a badge of honor, purchased with her pride.

No one had ever asked what she wanted.

“Dreams are like waves, babe. You have to wait for the right one to come along, the one that has your name on it. And then when it does, you have to get up and ride it.

A maléfice—a curse passed down through the generations—because one of us, some foolish Roussel whose name has long been forgotten, once used la magie to steal another woman’s husband, breaking the first tenet of our creed: do no harm.

might cause us to forget our true purpose—to ensure the happiness of others.

Maman, born Esmée Roussel, daughter of Giselle Roussel,

La Sorcière de la Robe. The Dress Witch.

Every soul creates an echo. Like a fingerprint or signature that becomes infused in the things around us. Who we are. Where we belong. What we’re meant to bring to the world. No two echoes are alike. They are ours and ours alone. But they’re incomplete—one half of a perfect whole. Like a mirror without a reflection. And so each echo is constantly seeking its other half, to complete itself. That is what we look for in a reading, a sign that the lovers’ echoes are a match.

The female sex has always been troublesome for those in power, because we see things, know things.

People always find a way to justify their hate—and give others an excuse to fall in line. They put words in people’s mouths, plant them like viruses, then watch them spread.

Dreams are like waves, babe. You have to wait for the right one to come along, the one that has your name on it. And then when it does, you have to get up and ride it.

Perhaps because Rory had come to understand how the loss of something precious could completely unravel a life.

“Before she died, my mother told me there is a time for holding on and a time for letting go and that I needed to learn the difference.

There’s a particular brand of sympathy that comes with shared sorrow.

Pain has a way of hardening us, each new heartbreak laying down a fresh layer of protection, like the nacre of a pearl, until we think ourselves impenetrable, immune to both our present and our past. What fools we are to believe it.

She never understood duty. And I . . .” Her eyes drift from mine. “I never understood anything else.”

You realize too late that it was there for the taking—right there in your hands—and you let it slip away. Because you let something—or someone—keep you apart.

“We’re all a collection of our stories, chérie. Our joys and sorrows. Our loves and losses. That is who we are, a tally of all our agonies and ecstasies. Sometimes the agonies leave a mark, like a bruise on the soul. We do our best to hide them from the world, and from ourselves too. Because we’re afraid of being fragile. Of being damaged. That’s what makes us kindred spirits, Rory—our bruises.”

“She said to keep someone in your heart is to keep them alive forever.

Adding beauty to the world isn’t vanity, chérie. It’s a calling.”

I’d fancied myself a kind of historian—le gardien des fins heureuses—the keeper of happy endings.

To ensure a happy ending, a bride must be willing to give her whole heart to the man she

marries. Her spine, however, must at all times remain her own.

At such moments, we will trust anything, believe anything that allows us to hold on to hope.

I refuse to let someone else’s rules cheat me of my bit of joy.

Even when they’re taken from you, years later, you still feel them, like an echo calling back to you.

“I’m merely pointing out that letting one group decide what is and isn’t worthy can have terrible consequences. Art, like all things, should be left to the beholder, n’est-ce pas?”

I have always grieved the ends of things.

“No one can take her away from you, Camilla. She’s your daughter. You’re bound for life, and by something that runs much deeper than blood and shared memories. You’re bound by your echoes.”

She believed we each possess an echo, a kind of spiritual fingerprint, and that those echoes connect us to the ones we love, binding us forever.”

“How a person behaves toward us is never about us, Rory. It’s about them.

“One doesn’t have to be alone to be lonely, chérie. They’re not the same thing.

It’s a hard thing, perhaps the hardest of all, to trust when we’re afraid—to open ourselves to the risk of forgiveness. But forgiveness is the greatest magick of all. Forgiveness makes all things new.

There are no curses. Only patterns meant to be broken. Dreams to chase. Hearts to hold. Magick to make.