The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Barbara Davis

“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. This dream has your name all over it.”

we’re meant to be content with our solitary lot, to sacrifice our happiness in service to others.

we women seldom get the life we would choose for ourselves. Instead, our lot is chosen for us, by those who claim to know best, and before we know it, we’ve been shaped into someone we don’t recognize, remade in someone else’s image.

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.

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.

There is a grief worse than death. It is the grief of a life half-lived. Not because you don’t know what could have been—but because you do. 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.

“There are times for holding on in this life, So-So, and times for letting go. You must learn to know the difference—and trust your heart enough to let it break. It’s a hard thing, this holding on. But that’s where the faith comes in.

And I liked the AFS’s motto—that freedom and mercy shall not perish from this earth.”

“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

“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.”

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.

Without faith, even our work is doomed to fail. Faith is everything.

But forgiveness is the greatest magick of all. Forgiveness makes all things new.

Because we’ve discovered a new kind of magick—the kind that comes with choosing for ourselves, with saying I will do something else, be something else, have something else.