At first, she told herself he’d gone out. Then she told herself he’d be back. By the second morning, she stopped lying.
The air felt wrong, still, tense, as if the building itself was missing something.
Every creak made her flinch, and silence shivered into sharp edges. Her apartment, once her messy sanctuary, now felt hollow. Not with grief, with almost, with the ache of what was nearly hers, and still might not be.
She tried to distract herself.
Cleaned like a woman possessed.
Reorganized her books by color, then alphabetized them just to be sure. Lined up her spices like they were soldiers.
Called Maya and pretended everything was fine.
It wasn’t.
By the time the sun bled down behind the skyline on the 30th, she was strung out, sleep-deprived, and wearing a hoodie that still smelled like him even though she hated herself for it.
Blair sat cross-legged, knees aching, sleeves stained with wax and regret.
She didn’t mean to pick up the chalk.
It just called to her.
Like a memory, or a muscle reaction, or maybe it was something older.
The faded sigils on her floor were nearly gone now, scuffed by time and hope and panic. But her fingers moved anyway. Re-tracing. Re-centering.
She whispered as she worked, not in Latin.
Just the truth.
“I wanted you to stay.”
The candle wouldn’t light. She used a match, then the stove, then a lighter.
Nothing caught.
Of course, it wouldn’t be easy. Magic never was.
She grabbed the last thing she hadn’t thrown away: the stupid birthday candle from the original spell. Bent. Half-burned.
Perfect.
She jabbed it into a chunk of old wax and muttered, “Fine. One more try.”
The flame caught, and so did the room, not with fire, but with presence. The air shifted. The walls hummed.
The Before was listening.
Blair swallowed. “I release the fear,” she whispered. “The part of me that thinks no one ever stays. That doesn’t trust love when it shows up.”
She placed her hand in the center of the sigil. Thechalk sparked where her fingers touched.
“I offer something back,” she said. “A trade, not for sex, not for magic. For a choice.”
The flame pulsed.
“What do you offer?” the shadows seemed to ask.
