Page 3

A nice clean house.

Maybe with a porch, and a good man who'd sit on it with me, yet not need me to shrink to fit next to him. Somebody's hand in mine while the sun went down over a life we built ourselves.

Grandbabies climbing my legs.

And their ability to see my treasured love—a love that got to grow old. Silver-haired, slow-moving, still-laughing old.

Instead, I had seven graves and a shovel.

Aunt Delphine sucked her teeth. "You told him about the curse, and that he shouldn’t fall in love. That was his mistake.”

“Still. . .”

The women in my family had learned young. Love with one hand, and keep the other one wrapped tight around our hearts.

My great-great-great-grandmother was the one who triggered the curse. She’d been the first to be born out of slavery, and she had played with enough dark power to make the whole bloodline pay for it.

We carried proof of the curse on our bodies. A black heart marked the center of my chest, its edges so perfect that strangers mistook it for a tattoo. No tattoo needle had put it there.

I had entered the world with that heart, just like my mother, her mother, and her mother, and every other woman born into the curse.

The moment a man loved us back, he lost his mind, got sick, and died.

I wiped my cheeks. “Maybe, I could have—"

“Nothing you could have done.”

“This damned curse. It’s not fair—”

"Every family has curses. Every generation has a responsibility to break a few so the generation after us has an easier life."

“There’s no breaking this curse—”

“That’s enough.” Aunt Delphine clicked her cane against the dirt. “Rock up and move on.”

The word enough landed different than the rest. It was heavier, and not only pressed against my chest, it actually stung my skin.

And this was just the Bayou Banshee’s voice power on the lowest level.

I shut my mouth.

She got closer. The top of her head barely reached my shoulder, yet I felt as if I were the one being looked down upon. "It's time for you to make that trip to Japan now.”

Goddamn it. What is wrong with her?

Andre wasn't even cold, and she was already pointing me toward the next thing as if grief were a shirt I could just take off and change.

Then again, she'd watched my mother and her mother bury more men than I ever would. Maybe she knew it was better for me this way.

Aunt Delphine gazed down at all the graves for my ex-lovers. “I think it was around man number four when I told you to get that root in Japan. I let you ignore me to teach you a lesson. Now the teaching is done.”

“There is no cure to this curse. That’s what you told Mama.”

“That was definitely true for your Mama, but that is not true for you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The great wonders of our world were not put here for you to understand, girl.”