Lucy March's Blog

I am the victim of emotional and psychological abuse and sexual assault at the hands of my ex-husband. I have spoken about this publicly on social media, on my podcast Big Strong Yes, but I haven’t named him. It was easy for people who cared to discover who he was, but I didn’t name him.

I was called classy for this.

I wasn’t classy. I was afraid.

I have been avoiding speaking publicly about the specifics of his abuse and naming him because I just wanted it over. But as fans who disliked his behavior spoke up, his handful of defenders would go on social media, call me a liar, say I fabricated evidence, and attack my character. It has been reported to me that in private messages and DMs, they would try to intimidate and shame people who spoke out about what he was.

And all this time, I kept relatively quiet. Because I wanted it over, because every incident re-traumatized me, because I didn’t want my life to become about him. And because he’s threatened me with a defamation lawsuit if I speak.

All of these people who call him out are being brave. They’re not allowing his behavior to stand. And I’m hanging back, not getting involved beyond the occasional subtweet, trying to move on.

Well, I can’t move on, because this isn’t done. It won’t be done until I’ve spoken, until I’ve taken him to court to pay for the debt he abandoned me with, until I confront the supporters who call me a liar in the shadows but won’t face me in the daylight.

And I also realized something; defamation is only actionable if what I say isn’t true.

Well, everything I’m about to say is absolutely true, and I have documented evidence and witnesses.

So let’s dance.

In 2010, Alastair Stephen Morris, aka Alastair Stephens, wooed me from Scotland. He told me he was living alone, and made up a group of friends that he told me elaborate stories about. He told me about their romantic entanglements, their personal dramas, how happy they were that he’d found someone to love.

I knitted a pair of socks for one of them when she broke up with her boyfriend.

Later, I would discover that those people did not exist.1

A year into our marriage, I received an email from a woman in Scotland, who said that she’d lived with Alastair for the previous ten years before he’d moved in with me. He’d raised her daughters with her. He’d also left her in debt; she’d cosigned his student loans. When he ran off to be with me, he’d left no forwarding information, so the bank had gone after her.

She put out ads trying to find him.

Eventually, she tracked him down. He’d changed his public-facing name from Morris to Stephens, but we were living publicly, and she found him. She asked him multiple times to take care of his debt, and when he didn’t, she got in touch with me.

He knew this was coming. He knew it was going to devastate me. He’d been dodging her for at least weeks, maybe months. He never said a word to warn me, just let the email slam me from out of nowhere.

He gambled she was going to go away and not pursue it; he lost.

I confronted him. I was so hurt and so angry. One thing I can’t have, because of the way I grew up, is lies. He knew that.

I learned that he had no friends, not a one, and he had been living with a woman whose daughters he had raised as his own for ten years, before running off without a word of goodbye. He had even sent me a picture of him with one of those daughters, claiming her as one of the imaginary friends.

But I’d brought him over from Scotland. I’d made him stepfather to my children. I loved him. He said he hadn’t been a good man, but he had changed. Loving me had changed him. He begged me.

I forgave him.

‪And every time in the future, when I mentioned that his lies bothered me, he shamed me, told me I wasn’t able to forgive. That I was a grudge holder.

That there was something wrong with me.

We made monthly payments on the debt he’d tried to dump on the woman in Scotland. When she’d gotten in touch and told me her story, I apologized to her, and made sure it was taken care of.2

‪Throughout our marriage of six years, he questioned every decision I made. I couldn’t go shopping by myself, couldn’t drive myself to work. If I chose a lightbulb, he’d question my selection. I gave him complete control of everything, including my finances. I’d lost all confidence in myself.

Listen to us on Judge John Hodgman, where we joked about how he wouldn’t let me take out the garbage.

‪Over the years, he favored one of my daughters, and was cruel to the other. My youngest couldn’t speak a word, but he’d slam her verbally. I started to challenge him on that. We’d fight, and by the end of the fight, he’d have me convinced I was the bad parent.

My older daughter, the one he favored, he’d force to sit on his lap, all the time. When she got older – 15, 16, then 17 – I thought it was weird and inappropriate, but I’d been primed to believe that something was wrong with me when I doubted him.

It made her uncomfortable, as did other things he did that I didn’t know about until recently, but she felt the same way; that something must be wrong with her to even think such a thing. The things he did were creepy and inappropriate, but not legally actionable; not too far over the line. That’s why she never said anything, not until she’d processed enough of the trauma to realize these weren’t normal things.

That’s how trauma works; it takes time to admit and understand what really happened, because when it’s happening, you have to deny it to get through the day.

‪All this time, he sold me on our fated love story. Soulmates. Aristophanes, baby. I thought it was love, because abuse feels like love. He made me question myself, then when I was feeling like hell, played love. Fed me the poison, sold me the cure. Over and over.

‪That’s how abusers make abuse feel like love.

‪Whenever I questioned him on things he was doing in our business, he’d tell me we’d had the conversation and I had agreed. I didn’t remember these conversations. I worried I had early-onset dementia.

He let me worry.

My mother has Alzheimer’s.

‪Think about that for a minute.

‪He used my fear of ending up like my mother to make me doubt myself. ‪

It didn’t occur to me that we’d never had those conversations until, after the breakup, I spoke to his ex in Scotland, who told me he’d routinely done the same thing to her. It wasn’t until then that I realized something very important.

I didn’t forget conversations with anyone else.

3

‪Then, as I was starting to challenge him on the verbal abuse he regularly doled out to my youngest daughter, another vulnerable woman in the middle of a divorce with a young daughter arrived on the scene.

‪He went from soulmates and Aristophanes to telling me he was worried we might get a divorce, overnight. He told me he’d asked me to go to counseling months earlier and I’d refused, so our breakup would be my fault.

I do have a vague memory of discussing counseling when we’d started to fight, but our insurance didn’t cover it, and we didn’t have the money to pay out of pocket, and we were so in love and so good together that we figured we’d get through it. I had never outright refused, but I’d been primed for years to doubt myself, doubt my recall of my own experience. I couldn’t believe he would lie about something like that, so I trusted his account, accepting it as truth, which I now know, it was not.

Now, he refused to go to counseling as I wept and begged him, claiming it was “too late.”

‪One night during this time, as I was weeping in the fetal position in my office, he told me he resented that I’d gotten a tubal ligation without consulting him–not true, we discussed it before I had the procedure done; he was fine with it and supportive–and that I had stolen his chance to have children of his own.

‪This was just days after I voiced my suspicions about him and this woman, and I mentioned that she could still have babies.

Like everything I’ve ever said revealing a vulnerability to him, he twisted it to use against me.4

‪Lather, rinse, repeat with the gaslighting, as he planned his trip to go visit her and other friends in Oklahoma without me, while telling me that my doubts and lack of trust were the reason why our marriage was failing. It was during this period that he sexually assaulted me, twice. I was so shocked; during our entire life together, he’d never been non-consensually aggressive in bed. It was like he had suddenly turned into someone else, and it took my mind some time to process what had happened.

During the first weeks after Alastair left, I told a number of people about the sexual violence. Many of them then tried to talk to me about it later; I refused. My therapist knew; I refused to talk about it when she brought it up. Trauma splits you into two people; the one who knows, and the one who denies. The one who knows is right, but the one who denies is afraid, and fear is stronger.

For a while, anyway.

It took me a year to fully accept that this happened to me, at which point I filed a police report.5

He asked for a divorce on New Year’s Day, shocking me and my daughters. Remember, the first mention of divorce after years of Soulmates and Aristophanes had been about six weeks earlier.

I asked him not to go to Oklahoma, to work through the separation with our girls, who had loved him as a father for six years. The girls and I had to be more important than a vacation?

Nope.

He left two days later, and was openly with his girlfriend while there. Witnesses reported to me that she sat on his lap and made out with him at parties in front of people. He used our joint account to buy her gifts, including according to witnesses, a promise ring. Witnesses also told me they were talking about a Christmas wedding.

All this less than a week after he’d abandoned the last woman he’d married, and the children he’d raised for six years.

My daughters, after he left for Oklahoma, turned to me and said, “You know what’s weird? I feel better.” They realized right away what an oppressive presence he’d been. Took them a few days to get his number down completely, despite their pain and trauma.

It would take me months longer to realize the same thing.

He claims I turned them against him. It’s not true. They spent months trying to get me to wake up.

‪He returned home to collect his things. He told me he’d be rooming with a mutual friend in Oklahoma City, a man I knew and liked, and he again insisted that he and this woman did not have a romantic relationship.

A month later, when someone else who knew confirmed for me that they were together, he finally admitted to the affair, and told me that I’d forced him into her bed by yelling at him on the phone during his vacation.

He told me it was my fault he slept with her.

My. Fault.

‪The roommate, a mutual friend who saw Alastair for what he was from the moment he arrived in Oklahoma City, told me later that Alastair had spent maybe three nights in the room he’d rented that first month. A number of her friends from that circle also felt something was seriously wrong with him, and with their relationship.

Multiple witnesses in Oklahoma City— her friends—saw it all clearly with no input from me, and left the friend group because of him. He proceeded to trash talk those people to me, and presumably, to anyone else who would listen.

Alastair was living with this woman from jump, even while still telling me I was paranoid thinking they were together, and why didn’t I trust him? If I was unable to trust him, how could we have ever worked?

Again. My. Fault.6

‪I didn’t understand any of it. I was crying all day, every day, shocked and horrified and scared to death. I got in touch with his ex. She told me her experience, eventually writing up a legal affidavit for me.

This woman has live-chatted her experience with about 25 people present on a private chat server, while I was also present.

Again, witnesses. His defenders like to claim my documentation is fabricated.

It is not.

‪During this time, his sister, with whom he was estranged, contacted me and told me that his stories of an abusive childhood were not true. She told me he was the abuser, physically assaulting her and their mother, until finally getting thrown out of the house by their mother’s boyfriend after assaulting his mother. His brother, also estranged, confirmed her account for me. Neither of them want anything to do with him.

‪To provide for my kids, I started a media company and got a full-time job.‪

He did not get a job. Instead, he also started a media company and named it for my nickname for him, which was North.

I wept and begged him to name it something else, anything else. He harangued me until I gave in. He designed the logo with a compass, which was our symbol when we were together.7

‪That summer, I told him everything I’d learned from his ex, her daughters and his sister and brother. I’d been unable to find one person, not one, from the first 32 years of his life (the age he was when we met) who wanted anything to do with him. Everyone hated him, and everyone had deeply disturbing stories.

During this time, I started to call him and his girlfriend out on social media.

SUDDENLY, he loved me again. He was leaving her. He just needed time to get a job, figure out where he was going to live, find a way to make it up to me and my girls. He wanted to change! He just needed a chance!

But there was no chance if I kept talking publicly about what he’d done.

He told me that with public pressure on him and his girlfriend, he had no choice but to stay with her. When I spoke publicly about what he’d done, I was forcing him to stay with her.

Again. My fault, right?

‪Fans who had watched all this happen, who had suspected him long before I did based on how he’d spoken to me in our podcasts and how he’d shamelessly been flirting with this woman on Twitter while we were still together, were publicly expressing their displeasure with him and his girlfriend.

I asked them to stop.

Meanwhile, I desperately didn’t want any of this to be true. I needed it not to be true. ‪I loved him.

‪During the day, I’d convince myself everyone else was wrong about him. My daughters would cry and yell at me, telling me that he was lying and manipulating me. I promised that I would never let him near them again, but I loved him, and if he could change and be better, I deserved the chance to have my husband back.

After all, I hadn’t done anything wrong. He had. I didn’t deserve this.

At night, I’d wake up with clarity, furious, and send him scathing text messages. I have all of these texts, both his and mine. Those angry, inconsistent messages probably made me look unstable and crazy.

I was neither. I was abused and traumatized.

‪He cried poor. I gave him permission to use my credit card for a total of about $70 in business expenses, despite him leaving me with $20+k in debt, sole responsibility for our back and current taxes, a mortgage, two kids, and a failing business.

He maxed out the credit card buying comic books, Audible subscriptions, and Google Play apps. He put $300+ directly into her PayPal account, which was listed on the statement with her username.8

The credit card statement, with yet another betrayal in front of me in black and white, finally woke me up. I accepted what he was. I sent my documentation to her and her friends, including the texts he’d been sending me all day, every day, all summer, which included pictures of him in her house.

‪I shared my story of his abuse and the sexual assault.

‪They called me a liar.

I can produce a dozen people who have known me for decades who will testify to my character, one of whom is my first husband, with whom I’m still good friends. Everyone who has known Alastair for longer than a few years hates him. There are no exes, no old friends, nobody who will testify as to his character.

Well, they will. They have. And it’s not good. I have it all, in my documentation.11

‪Fans who witnessed his behavior resumed calling him out publicly. I have never asked them to, but neither have I since asked them to stop. They were deceived and betrayed, too. They have a right to their anger, as do I.

I have, multiple times, privately and publicly, asked the fans to leave the girlfriend alone on social media. While her complete lack of consideration for me was willfully cruel, I remember what it’s like to be in his grasp. How convincing he is. How he makes you doubt yourself. I was ready to defend him when I had been his victim.

We’re members of a shitty sorority, she and I, but she got him out of my life, and out of my daughters’ lives. I have no idea how long it might have taken me otherwise to see the truth about him. While she did it selfishly and with absolutely no consideration for me, my empathy for her remains, and for that, I continue to request that people leave her alone. The path before her is painful and heartbreaking, and I don’t envy her a bit.9

‪Our divorce was final in December. My daughters and I have been in therapy with the local domestic violence shelter for the past year. We are being treated for trauma stemming from years of emotional abuse.

‪He’s supposed to pay me $1500 a month per the divorce decree to cover the debt and taxes I’m paying. Right now, I get a little over $200 a month from the StoryWonk Patreon, for which I give him full credit, despite half of it being my work and the fact that I am paying all web and podcast hosting expenses for StoryWonk. That Patreon money reasonably dwindles every month, and will soon be gone altogether, leaving me saddled with the debt he left behind.

I heard from listeners that he commonly claimed other people’s ideas as his own. I never questioned him. I thought he was brilliant. And he is smart and insightful; some of his insights are truly his own.

Some. Apparently, not all.

I took down all of his solo work from StoryWonk. I am under no obligation to host his material. He has all the source files; he can put those up on his own dime any time he wants.

I’ve been accused of “destroying his life’s work.” In no way is that true. I’m just not hosting his intellectually specious material.

‪To the best of my knowledge, he still has not gotten an actual job. He podcasts with his girlfriend and a few friends. Not a dime of the $1800+ a month he makes off the Point North Patreon as of this writing goes to the wife and children he abandoned.

And until May of this year, he was still putting much of his monthly business expenses on my credit card. This is partially the credit card company’s fault; I’d removed him as an authorized user in October of last year. But he allowed those charges to continue to go on my credit card.

I reported the fraud to the police, and to the credit card company. They have his name and address, but the phone number I have appears to be defunct, as the officer had to call his girlfriend’s phone to tell him to stop charging fraudulently to my credit card account.

All this while his girlfriend posts #poshwild #poshlife and #gatsbylife to her social media, bragging about expensive dinners out and treating themselves.10

Alastair has threatened me numerous times since he left. He once threatened to force me to lose my house, and have nowhere for the kids to live. Once, he said in a menacing tone that if his girlfriend kicked him out because I spoke up, he’d move back to the town I lived in. When I didn’t succumb to those threats, he manipulated me into believing that he was sorry, he loved me, and he was going to get better. When I woke up from that, he told me we’d never speak again. That one wasn’t so bad; I was okay with that one.

After I came out with my story of the sexual assault on Big Strong Yes, Alastair and his girlfriend threatened me with a defamation lawsuit through back channels. Alastair knows how stressed out I get with paperwork and lawyers; after all, he went through the horrible immigration process with me. He knows I hated every minute of it, and he’s banking on me being too intimidated by lawyers and paperwork to risk a lawsuit.

But you know what?

I’ve changed. I really have. I’ve grown as a person. After what I’ve been through, paperwork does not even come close to intimidating me. And I can afford a lawyer, because I got a job.

I have documentation and witnesses and people who will testify to my character.

And people who will testify to his.11

‪He has only what he’s always had; lies, charm and the ability to convince almost anybody of almost anything.

Except, I’m willing to bet, a judge.12

I am not lying about this. This is what he is. This is who you support.

Believe that he’s made mistakes. Believe that he can get better. Make him get a job. Make him go to therapy. Support him if he does. All of that is fine. I know what it is to be in his grasp, and I know what it is to love him.

But if you call me a liar, if you look at all of this and try to convince yourself that I made it up, if you think he’s not lying to you and letting you defend him while he knows that everything I’m saying is absolutely true… that’s a dark path and a dark future. Love him, support him, help him get better; fine.

But know this: You believe him, and dismiss me, to your peril. No one warned me, except his ex, who only told me in that first email that he was manipulative and controlling. She couldn’t have warned me more; she was still reeling from what he did to her, and she just wanted the debt collectors to stop harassing her. She wanted it over, and she wanted to move on. I don’t blame her at all.

But I’m giving you the chance I didn’t get. I’m telling you the truth. I have witnesses, documentation, and two daughters that he hurt greatly. If you think I can compel false testimony from that many people, you seriously overestimate my power. I know what he is, and I know what he’s doing, right now, to all of you.

This is your chance. I suggest you take it. He knows that everything I’m saying is true, and he’s letting you take the shots for him while he hides in your shelter. Make him face that. It’s the only chance you’ve got to come out of this without sustaining the kind of hurt and devastation he visited upon me, and everyone who has ever loved him.

The best predictor of the future is the past. Ignore me today, and someday, you will wish you hadn’t.

I will absolutely not speak to you privately, so this is what you get.

I heard from R, your childhood friend. He told me things about you, even then, that were dark and disturbing. I know this darkness within you goes back to childhood. I don’t know if you were born this way or if you were made. If there’s hope for you or if there isn’t. I suspect what you are, but I don’t know for sure. You are not my husband; he was a fiction. But you are what is left of him, and for the sake of that imaginary man who I loved with all my heart, I will tell you this:

Hope has always been the one thing that got to you. Hope was always the thing you thought you didn’t have. You always knew what you were. You told me a number of times that you weren’t a good man, that you weren’t worthy of me, and God, how I wish I’d listened to you. If hope is the thing with feathers, you have truly been on the flight of the featherless.

But this, right now… this is your hope. This is your chance. Come clean, and let the people who love you help you. If they stood by you through the lies, they’ll stand by you through the truth. Honestly, if they don’t care about the things you did in their full view, I don’t think they’ll care about the rest of it, as long as you don’t do it to them. I hope with all my heart that you have not already done things to them that you cannot come back from.

What you’ve done to me, and my children, and everyone who has ever loved you, has been unconscionable. You may feel you’re too far gone, you can just continue on this path and let it go where it goes.

Or…

You can get a job, get some therapy, work your shit out, and stop lying to the people who love you. You can start over. Where there is life, there is hope. Start meeting your responsibilities to the family you abused and abandoned, and take this opportunity to truly be a better man for the family you have now. I don’t believe you can, but I hope you will. I hope this all ends here, and the pain you inflict on the people who love you stops now.

There it is again. Hope.

Despite all, I still believe in redemption. It’s not an easy road, but it’s the only one that has any hope of ending well for you and for the people you now claim to love, as you once claimed to love me.

But if you want to go the other way, if you want to continue to call me a liar and sue me for speaking the truth, then I’ve got the sheet music right here, darling.

And I’m ready to dance.

What I have to support my story, which I will share in court:

1: Supporting Evidence: Emails containing audio files from Alastair in which he tells stories of his “friends.”

2: Supporting Evidence: The original email communication from his ex, in which it is clear that I was taken by surprise by the whole thing, and he clearly lied to me.

3: Supporting Evidence: Emails from the ex; witness testimony from my two daughters.

4: Supporting Evidence: Witness testimony from friends and daughters.

5: Supporting Evidence: Police report. Witness testimony from people who I told about the event very soon after it happened. My story details have not wavered; only my ability to face them and deal with them, which I finally was able to do in December of 2017, when I filed the police report. Email from Ex saying she wasn’t surprised, he had behaved similarly with her. Witness testimony from live chat in which she discussed those experiences; live chat transcript.

6: Supporting Evidence: Multiple witnesses’ testimony.

7: Supporting Evidence: Email from sister; multiple witnesses’ testimony. Emails and audio files in which I call him “North.”

8: Supporting Evidence: Emails/texts between me and Alastair spanning July 2017 to September 2017; credit card statements.

9: Supporting Evidence: Email to girlfriend and friends detailing everything, and containing documentation including legal affidavit statement from the ex (with some details excluded here as they involve her daughter). Witness testimony regarding my asking people to stop calling him out on social media.

10: Supporting Evidence: Divorce decree. Credit card statements. Police report. Screenshots of girlfriend’s social media posts.

11: Supporting Evidence: Including but not limited to testimony from: 1) His ex; 2) Ex’s two daughters who lived with him and he raised; 3) His sister; 4) His brother; 5) Me; 6) My daughters; 7) His childhood best friend; 8) The woman he was having online sex with while he was wooing me and telling me I was his soulmate, his only one, forever and always, Aristophanes, baby. Out of everyone I found or who found me, not a single one would defend him or say anything nice about him.

12: Supporting Evidence: Due to the private nature of some of Alastair’s offenses against other people, I have not shared everything that he has been accused of here, only what I and my daughters experienced first-hand, what witnesses have reported to me, and details which have already been shared publicly. The rest of the story is theirs, but I do have emails and and affidavit from those people telling their stories, which I will supply to any judge who doesn’t dismiss this case out of hand, should Alastair ever pursue it.

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Here is the unedited version of the opening scene of the new book, For Love or Magic, which doesn’t have a release date yet, but if I had to guess… I’d put it at February of 2016. Enjoy!

“Let’s be clear about one thing, Seamus,” I said, giving the bullmastiff the French fry he had been whining about since I pulled it out of the bag. “Just because I’m feeding you doesn’t mean you’re my dog.”

I wasn’t trying to be mean, but I didn’t want him to start getting all attached just because I gave him a stupid French fry, either. In truth, there didn’t seem to be much danger of that; he inhaled the fry and continued to remain indifferent to me, which was really best for everyone.

I drove along in the ratty old sky-blue Chevy pickup truck that was only technically mine. Much like Seamus, I hadn’t chosen it and I didn’t like it.

“Hey,” Judd admonished from the spot between me and Seamus where he crouched. “This truck is awesome. Perfect to haul home all those garage sale chairs and tables. I’m gonna refinish them, baby, sell ’em at a yuge profit, and we’ll be livin’ like kings.”

“It’s huge, not yuge, and you never did bring home a single piece of furniture. You couldn’t keep your word if it was sewn into your underwear, and I hate this stupid truck.” To make my point, I downshifted from fifth gear to fourth, letting the gears grind and sticking my elbow into Judd’s gut as I did.

Not that Judd had a gut anymore. He was dead.

“You hear that, Judd?” I said. “Dead. Gone. Finito. I’m a widow. Move on already, would you? Go toward the light.”

“I’ve moved on,” he said, his South Boston accent just as thick as ever. Even in death, he talked like he had a mouth full of mashed potatoes. “I’m dead. It’s you who’s keeping me here.”

He pronounced here with two syllables. He-ah. You’d think if I had to be haunted by the imagined ghost of my dead ex-husband, I’d at least give him a reasonable accent. British, maybe. I shot him a sideways look.

“Say ‘jolly good,’” I commanded.

He laughed. “You got a wicked sense of yumor, Ellie.”

“It’s humor. Hu-mor. With an ‘h’. Jesus.” I stuffed a fry in my mouth. Seamus whined again.

“I don’t care what you say,” Judd said, and shot me a sidelong glance, his eyes glinting with yumor. You had to give Judd that; no matter what he was doing, he was always having a great time. “You still love me, and you know it.”

I glanced in the rearview and saw his cocky smile, the very smile I’d fallen for way back in the day when I was too young and stupid to know better.

“Shut up.” I gave Seamus another fry, and he wolfed it down with such enthusiasm that I had to check my hand quickly to be sure all my fingers were still there. They were. They were covered in slobber, but they were still there. With the luck I’d had lately, I guessed I should be grateful. I wiped my hands on my jeans and took the left onto Wildwood Lane, which sounded like it should be really nice, but in reality it looked like the kind of abandoned dirt road where they shoot the the-missing-girl-was-last-seen-here pieces for the local news.

“Are you kidding me with this, Judd?” I said, my heart starting to race in response to the panic rushing through my veins. “What the hell kind of place did you buy, anyway?”

Judd leaned forward, grinning like the charming asshole he’d been in life. “Wait for it, baby. You’re gonna love it.”

“I doubt that,” I said, but when I looked to Judd, he was gone, and I was alone in his stupid truck with her goddamned dog, on my way to the only thing I had left to my name, thanks to him.

“Typical,” I muttered. “You couldn’t have bought a shack on a paved road, at least?”

I hit my foot to the gas, a move which had little actual effect on how fast that old rust heap moved, while Seamus stuffed his massive nose into the fast food bag. When I didn’t immediately object, he ripped it to shreds and ate my burger, wrapper and all, in two bites.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, but Seamus, as usual, ignored me.

The mailbox was not “rust-colored” as the real estate paperwork had claimed, but rather rust-covered, which I’d like to state for the record, is different. I wanted to drive past it, but unfortunately, the number 144 was painted onto the wooden stake it was impaled upon, and I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t seen it.

“Home, sweet home,” I muttered, and turned down the dirt driveway. Well, it wasn’t a driveway so much as a visible suggestion that once or twice some sort of vehicle had gone this way. The branches and leaves slapped at Judd’s stupid truck and eventually cleared away to reveal the glorified shack that turned out to be the only thing my dead husband owned that his debt hadn’t eaten.

Well, that and his dumb truck.

I stopped the truck, turned it off, and stared at my future, such as it was.

At least you’ll have a place to live, the estate lawyer had told me last month as he closed his leather briefcase and lifted it off the table in the diner where we’d met up. In cases where a husband leaves this kind of debt behind, I’ve seen widows left without anything. Or worse, with nothing, and bills left to pay. Considering how things could have gone, you’re actually pretty lucky.

Yeah, that was me. Lucky.

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, staring through the windshield and thinking.

“You don’t suppose…” I said to Seamus. “I mean… you don’t think Judd was running some kind of scam out here, do you?”

The dog, apparently uninterested in the why behind Judd’s real estate ventures, ignored me, but my mind kept picking at the problem. Judd had traveled a bit, and like most wives of small-time conmen, I hadn’t asked a lot of questions for fear of getting the truth. Had he been out here, working a scam during some of those absences? But why? Nodaway Falls, despite the name, had no real falls to boast of; there was little to no tourist traffic, and even less local industry. It was an hour and a half from Buffalo and a whisper away from the Pennsylvania border; the land itself was worth little more than Judd’s stupid truck. Not to mention that there was plenty of easy pickins on the one-hour route between Taunton, the small town in southwestern Massachusetts where he’d parked me after we got married, and Boston, where the rich and stupid came to get fleeced by the smart and lazy. The drive to Nodaway Falls, which was obviously not a super-wealthy community, was eight and a half hours. If Judd had been out here working a scam, it had been for something other than money, because nothing he’d get out here would have covered the gas.

I looked at Seamus and he panted at me, sated and slobbery in the mid-summer heat. I wondered if he had eaten Christy McNagle’s lunches, too.

“Dumb dog,” I said, and kicked open the driver’s side door. I stepped out onto patchy clearing that passed for a front yard, and stared at the run-down shack that was now all mine. It had shutters that were actual shutters, not just decoration, covered in peeling green paint. They might not be terrible with an updated color, maybe. The multi-paned front windows that looked original to the house, and sported the subtle variations in thickness as a result of the glass-making of the time. It gave the windows a textured, interesting look, but were also probably hell on energy efficiency. Well, the place didn’t have air conditioning, so that would be a problem for the winter. The place was small, about nine hundred square feet, with two bedrooms and one full bath. Not grand by any standards, but hell, it had a roof and a fenced side yard for Seamus, and I wasn’t exactly in a position to be picky.

Seamus lumbered out of the truck and stood by my side. His head came up well past my hips. The monstrous canine was a hundred and fifty pounds, more horse than dog. What kind of woman would buy a dog like that, anyway?

Of course, I knew exactly what kind of woman. The Christy McNagle kind of woman, the kind of woman who gets her blond from a bottle and her sexual ya-yas from my husband.

Former husband, I thought. Dead husband.

I looked down at Seamus and contemplated him for a bit. It was nicer to think about the stupid dog than it was to think about Christy McNagle and Judd doing whatever it was they were doing together while they were still alive and I was still oblivious and stupid.

“Go on, dog. Run around. Get some exercise.”

He looked up at me, licked his slobbering jaws, retrieving a sesame seed that had stuck to his nose. He let out a little huff of impatience and laid down in the dirt, settling his big dumb boulder of a head on his front paws.

“Yeah,” I said on a sigh. “I know how you feel.”

I stared at the house. I didn’t want to open that door, didn’t want to see what was inside, but I didn’t want to sleep outside, either. My dusty, used-to-be-white Keds moved forward step by step, and eventually, I found myself putting the key in the lock. Before I turned it, I looked back at Seamus, who was still lying on the dirt, watching me.

“Coward,” I said, and turned the knob.

I had taken a chunk out of my dwindling checking account to hire someone to clean the place. I’d started accounts with the gas and electric companies while staying at Judd’s sister’s house in Providence, so at least there would be lights and hot water. It was dark inside and I flicked on the switch. To my utter surprise, it didn’t set off a fire, and the ceiling dome light actually turned on, if a little reluctantly.

“See, what’d I tell you?” Judd said from over my shoulder. “It’s not so bad, right? I got the furniture and appliances included in the deal.”

I ignored him. He was dead. And, according to Dr. Fliegel, he was just my imagination anyway, a hallucination I made up to work through the grief. He wasn’t even a real ghost. A real ghost could tell you why, could explain, could apologize. All fake-ghost Judd did was the same stuff he did when he was alive; smile, charm, and lie.

I turned away from Judd, focusing my attention on the place. It really wasn’t that bad. To my right was the living room; it was small, but it had a woodstove in the center of the far wall and what looked like usable, if old, hardwood floors.

“You just buff those up, seal ’em, stain ’em, they’re good as new,” Judd said.

“Where did you even get that money?” I asked. “You paid a hundred thousand dollars in cash for this place, but can’t buy a decent truck. What the hell is that about, Judd?”

He grinned at me, and dodged the question. “I’m a man of mystery, baby.”

“Shut up,” I said absently as I surveyed the place. To one side of the woodstove was an overstuffed chair next to a standing lamp; a reading area. To the other side was a writing desk. In front was a beige La-Z-Boy that had seen better days, and a floral Victorian couch that made your back hurt just to look at it. No television, but that didn’t matter much. As soon as I got the wi-fi hooked up, I could watch movies on my laptop.

“What do you think, Seamus?” I asked the dog. “You think it’ll work?”

He ignored me.

I looked to the left; there was an eat-in kitchen, also small, but kind of quaint, separated from the cooking area by a peninsula counter that cut the space in half. The dining half had a small farmhouse table with four wooden chairs, no seat cushions. Lace curtains hung over the windows, unmoving in the stilted summer air. I walked to the window, and with a significant amount of effort and cursing, got it open. It didn’t get much fresh air in, but it was a start.

I moved further into the kitchen. The lumbering yellow appliances looked like they were straight off the set of I Love Lucy, with a big double-oven gas stove, and a yellow refrigerator with soft, rounded edges.

“Coldspot,” I said, reading the script logo written in metal on the door, and noticed that Seamus was suddenly at my heels. Of course he’d be here now; I was about to open a fridge, and the opportunity to eat more of my food was apparently too big to resist.

“It’s an antique,” Judd said, leaning one ghostly hip against the counter. “I bet it even works. Go on, open it.”

I pulled the large silver lever, half expecting it to fall off in my hand, but the door opened easily. I stuck my hand inside the fridge; it was legitimately cold in there. The freezer chest—I knew what to call it because it had Freezer Chest written in scripty metal on the plastic door—was a separate compartment tucked away up top, but when I pulled the plastic door down and peered inside, I saw that someone had put in modern ice cube trays, and the cubes were frozen solid.

Huh, I thought, closing the fridge. Must have been the cleaning service. My eyes teared up suddenly, and my throat tightened with emotion. It was a small kindness, but when things were bad, it was the small kindnesses that did you in.

“A little work,” Judd said, moving into the living room, “a little elbow grease, a little TLC, and this place is going to be our dream, Ellie.”

I wiped my eyes, leaned against the oven and looked out the front windows. In my imagination, I saw pale yellow curtains flowing in the breeze, and fresh cushions on the chairs.

Yeah, maybe, I thought.

I headed down the hallway. The bathroom had mint green walls with white ceramic tile halfway up, and was oddly large considering the dimensions in the rest of the house. The floor was white honeycomb tiles with dark blue ones marking out little daisy shapes at regular intervals, and I’ll admit it; my breath caught in my throat a little bit.

“Look at that,” Judd said over my shoulder. “A claw foot tub. Just like you always wanted. Do I know you or do I know you, huh?”

Seamus pushed himself past me into the bathroom, hitting the backs of my knees and making them buckle a bit. I checked the faucet and the hand-held shower head that was attached to the side of the tub; they were old, but they worked. It took the hot water a little while to come to the party, but hell, I was grateful there was hot water at all. There was no standing shower, but I liked baths well enough.

I could work with this.

I poked my head into the tiny back bedroom, which was empty except for the built-in bookshelves and the plain metal radiator under the window. I would have to paint that white, and the faded pink floral wallpaper wasn’t long for this world, but that could make a decent home office. Emotion bloomed in my chest, so powerful and unfamiliar that I had to lean against the wall to hold myself up as it rippled through my being. I recognized the emotion, but just barely.

It was hope.

“See?” Judd said, grinning like a fool. “I knew you’d like it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I crossed the hallway, put my hand on the old metal doorknob that presumably led to what the paperwork had described as “the big bedroom,” and turned. The knob rolled loosely from side to side, but didn’t open.

Crap.

I jiggled it; I could hear the metal bits clinking around inside. I yanked at the doorknob, cursing and kicking at the door. No joy. Seamus sat a few feet back, watching me dispassionately. I leaned my forehead against the door and let out a breath, my entire body vibrating with nerves as the thought occurred to me.

The knob is made of metal.

A painful jolt of fear ran through me, and I stepped back from the door. My magic was gone. It was gone-gone, had been gone for sixteen years and it wasn’t coming back. I’d made sure of that.

“Then what’s it gonna hurt to try?” Judd asked from over my shoulder.

I turned and looked at him. “What the hell do you know about it? You don’t even know about magic.”

“I didn’t know about it when I was alive,” he said, raising one eyebrow at me in gleeful encouragement. “But seeing as that doc said I’m just a projection of your imagination, that means I’m not really me, I’m really you, so I know what you know, and all I’m saying is… it can’t hurt to try.”

He grinned at me, and my heart soared a bit, but whether it was the memory of Judd’s smile or the wild fantasy of having my magic back again that was causing the flutter, I didn’t know.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll try. But it’s not going to work.”

I shook out my hands, released a sharp breath, and closed my eyes. The magic was still there. I knew where it was, lying in a box in my mind, but the box was locked, and that was that. I’d lived my life making sure that I never risked coming close to those things again. Instead, I’d engaged in other risky behaviors, like majoring in philosophy and marrying a man who had to lie the way most people had to breathe.

“You shoulda told me about the magic,” Judd said, leaning against the door jamb. “We could have done some amazing things if I’da known about that.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you. Shut up. I’m trying to concentrate.”

I could feel the workings inside the knob. I’d locked up my ability to manipulate the metal, but I hadn’t lost my connection to it. A piece had broken loose inside the mortise latch; I could turn that knob all day and it wouldn’t do a damn thing. It happened sometimes with old lock assemblies; probably the cleaning people had just shut the door too hard when they’d left, and it had finally broken down in protest. Or maybe the house had already made up its mind about me, and the verdict wasn’t good. I put my hand over the knob, wrapped my fingers around it, and reached for the locked box of magic inside, willing for it to open, while at the same time knowing it was shut for good. Still, it didn’t hurt to test it from time to time. To be absolutely sure.

I opened my eyes. There was no blue electric light dancing around my hands, no tingling in my palms and arms. No movement in the metal.

No magic.

“Aw, that’s too bad,” Judd said, disappointment thick in his voice. “I really wanted to see that.”

I stared down at the knob, feeling both sad and relieved. As much as part of me felt missing without the magic, the rest of me knew that it was for the best. I’d made my non-magical bed, and I’d been lying in it for sixteen years.

I went out to the truck, got the mini toolkit from the glove compartment, and spent the next fifteen minutes dismantling the old door assembly while Seamus slobbered over my shoulder and I pushed him away.

I got the door open, pushed through it, and my breath caught. The room had white beadboard wainscoting and yellow walls and gleaming wood floors and it was…

“Beautiful,” I breathed.

Right in the middle of the back wall was the refurbished white-painted cast-iron bed I’d had delivered from the local antique shop. I’d been charmed by the picture on the website, by the shiny exposed metal springs, by the idea that I could love it even after everyone else had abandoned it. I’d spent way more money than I should have on an old-fashioned feather mattress to go with it, which had also been delivered and was leaned up against the wall, still in its plastic wrapping.

I walked over to it and ripped off the plastic in a frenzy, then hauled the mattress over and, with some effort, got it onto the bed.

“What do you think, Seamus?” I said, looking back at the dog who had finally found his way to the room. “It’s great, right?”

Seamus walked over to the bed, sniffed the mattress, then curled up on the floor next to the bed.

“I don’t care what you say,” I said, “it’s gonna be…”

“…great, baby,” Judd said from behind me, hijacking the last of my sentence. “You and me, on an adventure, the way it was supposed to be.”

I turned and there he was, leaning against the door jamb, looking sexy as hell, his black hair ruffled and his smile just as crooked and bent as his soul. And stupid me, I wanted him back. I wanted his arms around me and I wanted him in my bed and I wanted to believe in the beautiful lies he spun for me, my own corrupted Rumplestiltskin spinning gold from bullshit. I missed him so much it hurt, and I hated him so much that I wished he could come back to life just so I could kill him.

“You’re not allowed in here,” I said, and shut the door in his face while his mouth was opening to form a reply. I kicked off my shoes, stepped over Seamus and settled down onto my new old bed, groaning with exhausted delight before falling into a dead sleep.

Well, it’s that time again – time to gear up the promotional machine and talk about the new book! Over at Heroes & Heartbreakers you can get the exclusive first look at the new cover, and right here, I’m giving you the finalized first scene! It’s Stacy Easter’s story, and she’s taking no prisoners!

That Touch of Magic,

by Lucy March

Chapter One

“Magic’s kind of high maintenance,” I said in low tones to Deidre Troudt as we huddled over the tiny purple potion vial that sat between us on the booth table in Crazy Cousin Betty’s Waffle House. “If you don’t want this to bite you in the ass, you’ve gotta follow a few rules.”

Ms. Troudt waved her hand at me impatiently. “Give me the disclaimers, Easter, but be quick about it. My lunch hour’s only an hour.”

“Okay. Well, one, you’ve gotta really believe in one true love.”

Ms. Troudt had been lifting her coffee cup, and halted it in mid-air to stare at me with those piercing brown eyes, and in a heartbeat, it felt like I was back in her high school English class. Her anger issues were legendary, but she was smart and kickass and she’d had all us kids in her class scared to death of her, which made me kind of love her. I almost started spouting a stream of crap about the themes of passion and transgression in Ethan Frome.

“Of course I do,” she said. “Why? Don’t you?”

I gave her a flat look. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

She lowered her coffee cup and tilted her head to the side a bit. “But you made the potion—”

“Homeopathic solution,” I said over her, raising my voice just enough to drown her out as I glanced at the tables around us. While the magic element in Nodaway Falls was fairly mundane, we made an effort to keep it under wraps as much as possible. No need spooking the locals.

To the untrained eye, Nodaway seemed like any other small, backward, and economically failing upstate New York town, and I guessed in most respects, it was. We had a small grocery, a waffle house/diner, and a bed and breakfast. The magic, in all honesty, wasn’t that big a deal most of the time. Power in most magicals manifested as quirks more than serious mojo. Take Betty, for instance, the septuagenarian owner of CCB’s; she could make baked goods out of thin air. It was kinda neat when you really needed a brownie, but it wasn’t anything truly mind-blowing. Olivia Kiskey, one of my best friends and a waitress at CCB’s, could make living creatures out of random household objects. Her boyfriend, Tobias Shoop, had some darker powers, but he never used them if he could avoid it.

And then there was me. I’d taken up conjuring to keep the lights on when I got laid off from my job as a county librarian last fall. For the most part, even when the magic got hot, most of the people in town tended to accept our rational explanations… like when I insisted in public that the low-level magical potions I made were homeopathic solutions. Honestly, I didn’t care what we called it, so long as I got my bills paid.

“No, wait a minute.” Ms. Troudt set her cup down, her expression a mix of annoyance and confusion. “How can you make the po—I mean, solution—if you don’t believe in it yourself?”

“My job is to mix the stuff,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It’s perception magic, so it’s about your perception. It really has nothing to do with me.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “I still don’t get it, but if you say so, I guess I’ll take your word on it.”

That was as big a gesture of trust as Ms. Troudt ever gave, so I took it. “What’s important is that you believe in one true love. Do you?”

She nudged her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. “Absolutely.”

I sighed, a little disappointed. No one in the free world had been dumped on by love more than Deidre Troudt. She’d been left at the altar three times, two of those times by the same guy. If I was a better person, I’d talk her out of spending her hard-earned money on a potion that would only confirm that yet another man wasn’t worthy of her time.

But I wasn’t a better person, and I had car payments.

“The other thing,” I went on. “No messing with free will.”

She gave me a surprised look. “How would I mess with free will?”

“You can’t dump this in anyone’s coffee and make him love you. Doesn’t work like that, and there are consequences for using magic to manipulate people.”

“Consequences?” Her brows quirked under her wild fringe of mud-brown hair, a non-style she’d been using to telegraph that she didn’t give a crap since as far back as I could remember. “What kind of consequences?”

I hesitated. The truth was… I wasn’t sure. It was just what I’d been told, and it meshed well with my personal sense of right and wrong, so I made sure all my clients were clear that they were not to dump potions intended for them into someone else’s drink.

I met Ms. Troudt’s eye, gave her a dark look, and lowered my voice. “You don’t want to know. Just don’t do it.”

Whatever foreboding I’d put into my voice seemed to miss the target, because Ms. Troudt waved a hand in the air. “Fine. Whatever.”

I craned my head to look around her, hoping Liv would be available to bring me a refresh on my coffee, but she was by the front door, talking to two men who had just come in. The first one, I could tell from the shiny back of his bald-ass head, was my older brother Nick. I wondered what he was doing here? Bernadette Peach, the third in the best-friend triumvirate with Liv and me, had my brother running all over the place preparing for their wedding this coming Saturday. So why was he hanging out in CCB’s with some random guy? From the back, I couldn’t even recognize who the random guy was, which was weird. I’d been born and raised in Nodaway and I could identify most of our tiny population at a hundred paces. The random guy was taller than any of the guys in the wedding party, with dark brown hair that looked like it had been cut with a weed wacker. There was something familiar about him, though, and my gut did a roller-coaster lunge as if it knew something I didn’t…

“Hey. Easter.” Ms. Troudt snapped her fingers to get my attention, much as she’d done whenever I’d drifted off in English class.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry, what?”

She reached into her bag and pulled out her wallet. “Is that it?”

“No.” I set my cold coffee mug down and turned my attention to the matter at hand. “When you’re ready, drink it all at once, like a shot. Then, you’ve got twenty-four hours to get into the same room with your guy.”

“Simple enough. Anything else?” Ms. Troudt stared at the vial with this weird look on her face and it made me uncomfortable seeing her like that, almost vulnerable and everything.

“Look, Ms. Troudt—”

“Knock it off with the Ms. Troudt stuff, Easter,” she said, her eyes still locked on the vial. “You’re selling me a magic potion so I can deal with my love life. Call me Deidre.”

“Fine… Deidre.” That felt weird. I hesitated, then pushed it. “You can call me Stacy, you know.”

She snorted rudely, but that was a big part of why I liked her so much. She’d never spent a day being polite in her life. She was my hero, and I loved her, and I didn’t want her to get hurt over some stupid guy.

“It’s not too late,” I said, annoyed with myself for being such a soft touch. Soft touches get their new yellow VW Bugs repossessed. But it was Ms. Troudt, so I forced the words out. “You can back out. I don’t have to sell this to you today.”

She shook her head, determination on her face. “Oh, no. I’m buying it.”

I leaned forward. “Look, if you don’t know if a man loves you, then your problem is the man, not the knowledge.”

She gave me the same dead-eyed look she used to save for the dumb kids. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I don’t know what you know,” I said, feeling a touch of professional indignation, “but you’re buying a potion—”

“Homeopathic solution,” she corrected automatically.

“—from me, and it’s part of my ethics to be sure you know what you’re doing before I hand it over. This is powerful stuff, and I want to know you’re going to use it right.”

I sat back, damn proud of myself. Ms. Troudt eyed me with a look of grudging respect.

“Good for you.” She hesitated a moment, then leaned forward. “Look, I believe in The One, but I don’t have the time or the energy for him. Whoever my One is, he waited too goddamned long, and now I’m forty-eight years old and I’m pissed off and I’m tired. I’ve got a few good years left to have a mediocre time in bed, and I have no intention of letting Real True Love screw with that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not following.”

She sighed. “You know the guy I’ve been seeing? Wally Frankel?”

“Sure. The new pharmacist at the CVS, right?”

“Right. So, he’s smart. He makes me laugh. He’s above average in the sack. He has this one move where he—”

“Yeah, that’s enough.”

“People over thirty have sex. Deal with it. Anyway, it’s all starting to make me a little nervous. If he’s The One and he made me wait this long, I need to beat him to death with my Dyson, and I really like my Dyson. If I know he’s not anything too special, then I can keep him.”

“So you want him to not be the one?”

She grimaced. “For fuck’s sake, Easter, don’t split your infinitives.” She sipped her coffee, then sighed. “I’m sorry. That was rude. My therapist tells me I should take responsibility when I’m rude, so… I apologize. Sometimes I forget you’re an adult now. You still look like you did when you were in my class.”

“I do not,” I said. “That was ten years ago.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “You got a rack that kicks ass and an ass that takes names. It’s unnatural and you know it, which is why you dress like that.”

“What’s wrong with the way I dress?” I glanced down at my outfit; jeans, a blue cotton button-down shirt some guy had left in my dorm room back in the day, a white tank underneath, and work boots.

“You’ve always been one of those girls,” she went on. “The girls who roll out of bed with perfectly tousled hair and have men waiting in a line just on the slim chance you might deign to kick ‘em in the balls. You’re not like the rest of us, Easter. You snap your fingers, you can have any man you want. The rest of us have to work for it, and even then, more often than not, what we work for still drips on the toilet seat.”

“They all drip,” I said.

Ms. Troudt put her hands up. “Hey, don’t get defensive.”

“Then don’t be offensive. Christ. If I had a nickel for every woman who told me I wasn’t like the rest of you, I’d have all the nickels. Speaking of which”—I nudged the vial toward her—“that’ll be fifty bucks.”

Ms. Troudt picked up her purse. “Look, I’m sorry if I was rude. Again. But women like you don’t understand what it’s like to get your heart smashed in a million pieces.”

Right, I thought, but then decided it wasn’t worth it. Deidre had done me a favor by pissing me off; I was going to enjoy taking her money now, no guilt.

“So,” she said, motioning to the vial, “I drink this on Friday, and the next time I see Wally…?”

“You have to see him physically in person within twenty-four hours, and if he’s The One, then you’ll see a glow around him, like an aura.”

She snorted, then her eyes widened as she looked at me. “Oh, you’re serious. And what if I see nothing?”

“Then he’s not The One.”

She stared at the vial, deep in thought. I raised my hand to wave for Liv to come refresh the coffee, but she was still talking to Nick and the other guy. Just at that moment, she shifted her gaze around the room until her eyes landed on mine, and that was when I saw the tense look on her face. Liv had been through a lot in the last year, and she wasn’t set off easily.

Something was going on.

“Well, what the hell, right?” Ms. Troudt said, opening her wallet. “You only live once.”

“Yeah,” I said absently, my eyes still on Liv, who was focused again on my brother and Random Guy.

Then Random Guy turned to glance around the restaurant, and everything else faded out of existence.

There, existing in my world as if he had the goddamn right, was Leo North.

He looked different. Older. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been tall and lanky; he’d filled out a bit, his shoulders broader and his posture straighter. But as different as he looked, he also looked exactly the same, that slightly dopey smile and permanent five o’clock shadow and that long, stupid nose. I had kissed that nose, a thousand times. Marked it.

It was my goddamned nose and he had taken it with him, the bastard.

My lungs froze in my chest and I couldn’t take any air in. My stomach muscles clenched tight, sending waves of pain straight through to my back. I had an instinct to both laugh and cry at the same time. I snatched one of the menus from the holder behind the napkin dispenser and held it up in front of my face.

“Crap, crap, crap, crap,” I said, peering up over the menu.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Ms. Troudt said, following my line of sight. “Is that Leo North? You know, he’s one of the few students I ever actually liked. Hey, North!” She waved in the air.

I let the menu flop down and stared at her. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why would you do that?”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

I released a breath, pushing the panic away. If I couldn’t escape, I had to be cool. I put both hands lazily on either side of my coffee mug as Leo walked over. He was smiling at Ms. Troudt, his affable, unassuming manner unchanged, even after all this time. He was the kind of guy no one looked at twice, so incredibly ordinary and average in every way except…

…except that he was my Leo, and I knew better.

He let out a shout of genuine delight. “Ms. Troudt? Hey! Good to see you.”

Ms. Troudt got up from her side of the booth and shook his hand, and she happened to angle herself away from me, which happened to angle him to face me, and our eyes met and he froze. I was trapped, unable to melt into the floor and unable to climb over the booth and run, so I gave a quick wave. He seemed to choke a little on nothing, the air I guess, which I found kind of gratifying. Ms. Troudt released his hand and he took a moment to pull his eyes off of me and make eye contact with her again. It was enough time for her to look at me, then at him, then back at me.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” She nudged Leo on the shoulder. “We know. She’s pretty. Stop staring.” She turned to me and gave a cocky quirk of her brow, as if to say, Told you so. I couldn’t work up a reaction; she turned back to Leo.

“Hey, didn’t you run off to become a Tibetan monk or something?”

“Catholic priest, actually,” Leo said, his voice still a little choked.

“Same difference. And you’re not the first of my former students to turn to God. I’m trying not to take it personally. Where the hell have you been?”

“South Dakota,” I said, unable to keep the edge out of my voice.

Ms. Troudt looked at me, and she seemed to finally pick up on the fact that something was going on here.

“South Dakota. Wow.” She shifted her focus to Leo. “What brings you back here?”

Leo cleared his throat. “Um, Nick and Peach’s wedding, actually,” he said, not taking his eyes off me. I don’t know how long we froze there, just staring at each other, but it was long enough for Ms. Troudt to become visibly uncomfortable.

“Yeah. This is weird. I’m done here.” She put a fifty-dollar bill in my hand, swiped the vial off the table and tucked it into her purse. “I’ve got to get going. Those mouth-breathers in summer school aren’t going to terrify themselves. See you kids later.”

It took a moment for Leo to respond, but then he smiled at Ms. Troudt and nodded. “Right. Later.”

She shot one last look at me, rolled her eyes and left. Leo stood where he was.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

He sank into the seat across from me. I wanted to kick him in the shins under the table and throw myself into his arms and cry. At the same time.

“So, Father Leo,” I said, keeping my voice as cool and light as I could. “Nick said you weren’t coming in for the wedding. Did you change your mind? Are you officiating now or something?”

“You don’t need to call me Father,” he said.

“You’re not wearing your collar.”

He released a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m aware of that.”

“Are you allowed to not wear it? Isn’t that against the rules or something?”

“Stacy—”

“Seems like the kind of thing that would be against the rules. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to mass, but as I recall, they’ve got rules for pretty much everything. I hear they’re frowning on the whole ‘Jesus in the potato chip’ thing now.”

“Stacy.” He reached across the table, then hesitated, his fingertips close enough to mine that I could feel the warmth coming from them. That’s probably scientifically impossible, but I used to be able to feel him when he was around the corner in the high school hallway, and I could feel him now, damnit. Still.

Then, on their own power, our fingers intertwined, so naturally, as if ten years hadn’t gone by without a word between us.

As if none of it had ever happened.

Leo smiled. “I had no idea it would be this good to see you again.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. My heart was pounding and my legs felt wobbly and I kinda wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t let go. It felt too good to be connected to him again, like water after so many years in the desert I’d forgotten what water was, let alone how much I needed it.

“Well, don’t let it be too good to see me,” I said, trying to recover my usual swagger and succeeding only the tiniest bit. “I’m very sure that’s against the rules.”

One side of his mouth quirked up a bit; his eyes focused on our hands. “Actually… that’s not my life anymore.”

I didn’t feel a response to that at all, although I knew I would later. I would feel all of this later, it was going to haunt me for days if not weeks if not months if not forever, but for the moment, a strange calm was settling over me. The wave of the tsunami was huge and hovering over my head, but for the moment I was dry in the curl of it, although it was inevitably going to crash on me. The only question was when.

“You left the priesthood?” I asked, almost choking on the words.

“No,” he said. “I left before it got that far.”

“You were gone ten years.”

“I left the Church before I took my vows, about three years ago. I’ve been working in construction, actually.”

“Construction?” I nodded, trying to process it all. “Well, that explains the shoulders.”

He gave me a confused look. “I’m sorry?”

“You should be,” I said, the words coming out more biting than I had intended, but what the hell? Leo was back and he wasn’t a priest.

Jesus.

His expression softened, and he leaned forward a little, his hold on my hand tightening. “Look, Stacy—”

I held up a hand to stop him from talking. “Not yet. Can’t do that yet. If ever.”

He nodded, and sat back again. “Okay.”

“So,” I said, forcing a brittle laugh. “Construction. That’s kind of a jump from being all Man of God and whatnot, huh?”

The words were coming out. Were they making sense? I had no idea. I was holding Leo North’s hand in CCB’s. Nothing made sense.

“I needed to do something else for a while,” he said. “I had a lot of stuff to figure out.”

“I bet. Why’d you leave?”

He released a breath. “It’s… complicated.”

“Everything’s complicated,” I said. “Don’t think. Just answer. Why’d you leave?”

He met my eyes and smiled, but it was a small, sad smile. “I guess I… kind of lost my faith.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It had been ridiculous, because I knew Leo hadn’t left me for the Church. The Church was just something he did after leaving me, but I’d always felt like the Church was the other woman. All these years, every time I walked past St. Sebastian’s, I kind of wanted to throw a drink at it and call it a whore.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s not funny.”

“Sure it is, a little.” That was my Leo. Always kind. Always understanding. Always forgiving. Such a good man.

The bastard.

“Still.” I took a breath. “I’m sorry. I really am.” I meant it, mostly.

He met my eyes, and put his other hand over our joined ones. “Stacy, the shock of this is going to wear off in a minute, and once that happens, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to speak to each other.”

“Why wouldn’t we be able to speak to each other?”

He shrugged. “You’re going to be mad. And you get… you know. Kind of hard to reach when you’re mad.”

I let out the most awkward and unconvincing laugh of my twenty-nine years. “Dude, don’t flatter yourself. I’m over it. What’s your name again?”

He kept his eyes on mine, that small, sad smile still on his face. My throat felt tight and my vision was going dark at the edges; he was the only thing in the world all of a sudden, just my Leo looking at me, and for that split second, everything was like it used to be.

And then Liv showed up and refilled my coffee mug and Leo released my hand and a brick wall of pain hit me hard. It was almost funny. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, and suddenly not touching him hurt. What the hell was that about?

“Hey,” Liv said, watching me carefully. “I’m sorry. It’s been really busy. Is your coffee cold?”

I didn’t say anything. My heart had stopped dead in my chest, and I couldn’t breathe, and I had maybe thirty seconds before I passed out.

“Leo, so good to see you again,” Liv said quickly. “I think maybe you should go now.”

Liv’s protectiveness was so stark, it almost made me laugh. Of course, she would be protective; she had been the one to peel me up off the floor when Leo left, and she’d had to practically nurse me through that first year. She had invested a lot of energy in gluing me back together, and there was no way in hell she was going to let Leo North shatter me into a million sharp pieces again. She stood at my side of the booth, her arms crossed and her stance wide, her long dark curls flowing over her shoulders, making her look like a warrior goddess, and her message was clear: Get out or die trying to stay.

“Okay,” Leo said, and he seemed barely able to get the word out. “I’ll, um… I’ll see you guys later.”

A few moments, and the bells on the door chimed; he was gone. I tried to take in a deep breath, but I couldn’t. My heart was beating again, though, so that was good.

Leo North. Leo goddamned North.

Liv slid into the seat he’d vacated and leaned over the table. “I called Brenda. She’ll be here to cover for me in fifteen minutes, then I’m taking you home and we’ll talk, okay?” She reached out and touched my hands. “Are you okay?”

“What?” I made a dismissive gesture with one numbed arm. “I’m fine.” I felt my left eyelid twitch, but Liv didn’t seem to see it; she was glancing at her watch.

She turned back to face me. “Fifteen minutes. I swear, and then I’m coming for you.”

“Sure, great,” I said.

The bells on the front door chimed again, followed by some gasps in the dining room, so I looked up. Peach was in her wedding dress, looking like Bridezilla Barbie, down to the platinum blonde hair and the blue eye shadow. Eleanor Cotton, Nodaway Falls’s seamstress laureate, trailed behind Peach, cursing and holding up armfuls of tulle and satin as best she could. Peach glanced around, one hand holding her veil to her poufy coif, the other clutched around her phone. She glanced around for a moment, saw us and headed over, dragging Eleanor in her wake.

“Oh, thank God!” Peach said. “I was at my fitting when I got a text from Nick!”

“No kidding,” Liv said flatly, and I would have laughed if I had it in me. I was still, for the moment, huddled up dry in the curl of a tsunami wave, awaiting the moment when it would inevitably crash down on me.

Peach put her hand flat on the table, leaned over toward me and stage-whispered, “Leo’s in town!”

“We know,” Liv said, but Peach didn’t acknowledge her. It was a dramatic moment, and those didn’t happen too often around here. This was Peach’s horse, and she was gonna goddamn ride it.

Peach stood up straight and put her hand to her forehead. “He just showed up. He RSVP’d that he wasn’t coming, then called Nick this morning from the airport. Totally out of the blue. I swear, I didn’t know until just now, or I would have told you.”

“Fuck!” Eleanor stuck her thumb in her mouth, apparently bitten by one of the thousand pins in Peach’s dress. She glared at Peach. “I’m adding hazard pay to your invoice,” she said around her thumb.

Peach pulled Eleanor’s hand out, looked at the thumb, and gave it back. “Oh, please. I’m an obstetrics nurse. Don’t complain to me until you’re seven centimeters dilated.” She turned to me. “Did you hear me? Leo’s in town.”

“We know,” Liv said again, a little louder this time. “He was just here.”

Peach’s eyes locked on me in alarm. “Oh. God. Stace! Are you okay? Do you need a drink? Happy Larry’s opens at noon.”

“I’m fine.” I forced a laugh that sounded hollow even to my own ears.

Liv pushed up from the table, looking wretched. “I really have to go. Brenda will be here soon and we’ll go back to my place, okay?”

“No, guys, really. I think I just want to be alone,” I said, but no one was listening.

“Okay,” Peach said to Liv. “I’ll stay here with you until Liv’s ready, and we’ll all go.”

“You’re not going anywhere in that goddamned dress,” Eleanor said, amping up the Brooklyn in her accent.

Peach turned on her. “Can’t you see we’re in crisis here?”

Eleanor narrowed her eyes. For a seamstress, she was pretty scary. “You wanna be in crisis? Try going somewhere in that dress.”

“Really,” I said. “Guys, I’m fine. It was ten years ago. Stop making such a big deal out of it.”

Liv looked at me, nibbling her lip, and Peach crossed her arms over her middle. They glanced at each other doubtfully, and I managed to get up from the table all by myself, which I thought was pretty impressive.

“I have a load of work to do,” I said, stepping around Peach’s huge dress. “And I’m tired. I think I might nap.”

I kissed Peach on the cheek. “Thanks for coming so fast.”

I patted Eleanor on the shoulder. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

I reached out and squeezed Liv’s hand, pressing the money from Deidre Troudt into her palm. It was a hell of a tip, but I didn’t care. I just needed to get out of there, fast. I didn’t have time to do the math on two cups of coffee and personal bodyguard services. “I’ll call you later.”

They might have responded to me; I don’t know. As I walked out of Crazy Cousin Betty’s, I couldn’t hear anything but a big, crashing wave.

Those of you who have been playing along at home know that writing the follow-up to A Little Night Magic has been something of a trial. I wrote 40k words, then threw it out because they weren’t right; then I wrote another 50k of a new draft, and threw that out because it wasn’t right. Then, I finally realized that I had to trust myself and just write what I wanted to write rather than what I thought someone else wanted me to write. And for those of you who have been patiently waiting for the new book, and who will have to patiently wait a while longer because the new one might not even be out until 2014 at this rate… here’s the opening scene of the new draft.

Also, you should imagine Dierdre Troudt played by Joan Cusack; she opened up the book for me, and I lurve her.

“Magic’s kind of high maintenance,” I said in low tones to Dierdre Troudt as we huddled over the tiny purple potion bottle between us on the linoleum table in a booth at the back of Crazy Cousin Betty’s Waffle House. “If you don’t want this to bite you in the ass, you’ve gotta follow a few rules.”

Ms. Troudt waved her hand at me impatiently. “EULA me up. My lunch hour’s only an hour.”

“Okay. Well, one, you’ve gotta really believe in one true love.”

Ms. Troudt had been lifting her coffee cup, and halted it in mid-air to stare at me with those piercing brown eyes, and in a heartbeat, it felt like I was back in her high school English class. I almost started spouting a stream of b.s. about the themes of passion and transgression in Ethan Frome.

“Well, obviously,” she said. “Why? Don’t you?”

I gave her a flat look. “I don’t think that’s relevant.”

She lowered her coffee cup and quirked her head, then motioned to the vial between us. “But you made the potion—”

“Homeopathic solution,” I said over her, raising my voice just enough to drown her out as I glanced at the tables around us. To the untrained eye, Nodaway Falls seems like any other small, backward, and economically failing upstate New York town. It wasn’t, but those of us in the know tried to keep that as quiet as we could, even from some of the fellow residents. People who don’t want to believe in magic will do most of the work of rationalizing everything for you; your job is to give them as little as possible to rationalize.

Ms. Troudt huffed, then said, “Okay. Whatever,” and took a sip of her coffee.

“Right,” I said, and sighed. “Second rule—”

“No, wait,” Ms. Troudt said, and set her cup down. “How can you make the po—I mean, solution—if you don’t believe in it yourself?”

“My job is to mix the stuff,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It’s perception magic, so it’s about your perception. So, are you sure you believe in one true love?”

She pushed her glasses up her nose. “Yes. I do.”

I sighed, a little disappointed. No one in the free world had been dumped on by love more than Dierdre Troudt. She’d been left at the altar three times, two of those times by the same guy. Her anger issues were legendary, but she was smart and kickass and she had all the kids who had been in her class scared to death of her, which made me kind of love her. I almost felt bad taking her money for something like this.

Almost. I had car payments.

“Okay, then,” I went on. “The other thing: No messing with free will. You can’t dump this in anyone’s coffee and make him love you. Doesn’t work like that.”

Her brows quirked under her wild fringe of mud-brown hair, a non-style she’d been using to telegraph that she didn’t give a crap since as far back as I could remember. “Well, right. Because it’s made to show you your one true love, right?”

I craned my head around her, hoping Liv would notice my pain and bring me a refresh on my coffee, but it was lunch rush and I was in the back and she was moving so fast she left motion trails behind her as she raced through the dining room. Sometimes it was great being best friends with the waitress; sometimes it meant being the last to get my coffee refilled.

“Easter?”

“Huh?” I glanced back at Ms. Troudt.

She gave me the same look she used to give me when I drifted off in her class. “It reveals your one true love to you, right?”

“Yeah. Right. But sometimes people try to use it on the loved one, and it’s bad news, so I just want to be super clear. You can’t mess with free will. You give someone a… homeopathic solution without their free will and it’s gonna backfire, big time.”

“All right.” She reached into her bag and pulled out her wallet. “Is that it?”

“No,” I said. “The last thing: You’ve got a week before it loses its power. After that, it’s expensive Kool-Aid.”

Ms. Troudt nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Oh, and you’re gonna get your strongest results on the night of a new or full moon. There’s a full on Friday.”

“Friday,” she said, staring at the vial with this weird look on her face. It was uncomfortable seeing her like that, almost vulnerable and everything.

“Look, Ms. Troudt—”

“Knock it off with the Ms. Troudt stuff, Easter,” she said. “You’re selling me magic potion so I can deal with my love life. Call me Dierdre.”

“Fine, Dierdre.” That was weird. I hesitated, then pushed it. “You can call me Stacy, you know.”

She snorted. A predictable response, but that’s what I liked about her. She’d never spent a day being polite in her life. She was my hero.

I leaned forward.

“It’s not too late, Dierdre. You don’t have to buy this from me. Some other idiot will buy it before the week is out. It’s no big deal.”

She stared at me for a moment, then said in the same tone she’d used to send me to detention back in the day, “Oh, I’m buying it.”

“If you don’t know if a man loves you, then your problem is the man, not the knowledge.”

She gave me the same dead-eyed look she used to save for the dumb kids. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I don’t know what you know,” I said, feeling a touch of professional indignation, “but you’re buying a potion—“

“Homeopathic solution,” she corrected.

“—from me, and it’s part of my ethics to be sure you know what you’re doing before I hand it over. This is powerful stuff, and I want to know you’re going to use it right.”

I sat back, damn proud of myself. Dierdre eyed me with a look of grudging respect.

“Good for you.” She hesitated a moment, then leaned forward. “Look, I believe in ‘The One,’ but I don’t have the time or the energy for him. Who ever my ‘one’ is, he waited too goddamned long, and now I’m forty-eight years old and I’m pissed off and I’m tired. I’ve got a few good years left to have a mediocre time in bed, and I have no intention of letting love screw with that. This guy I’ve been seeing is… well, smart. And funny. He makes me laugh. He’s above average in the sack. To be honest with you, it’s starting to make me a little nervous. If I know he’s not anything too special, then I can keep him.” A small smile lighted on her lips, and then she squelched it. “If he’s The One, I need to beat him to death with my Dyson.”

“So you want him to not be the one?”

She grimaced. “For fuck’s sake, Easter, don’t split your infinitives. It’s like nails on a chalkboard.” She sipped her coffee, then sighed. “I’m sorry. That was rude. My stupid therapist tells me I should take responsibility when I’m rude. So… I apologize. Sometimes I forget you’re an adult now. You still look like you did in high school. You know how annoying that is?”

I snorted. “I do not. That was ten years ago.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “You got a rack that kicks ass and an ass that takes names. Something in your genetics just flips both time and gravity off. I’ve seen your mother. It’s unnatural and you know it, which is why I think you dress like that.”

“What’s wrong with the way I dress?” I stiffened and glanced down at my outfit; jeans, a blue cotton button-down shirt some guy had left in my bedroom, a white tank underneath, and workboots.

“No offense, but you’ve always been one of those girls. The girls who roll out of bed with perfectly tousled hair and have men standing in line just on the slim chance you might deign to kick ‘em in the balls. You’re not like the rest of us, Easter. You snap your finger, you can have any man you want. The rest of us have to work for it, and even then, more often than not, what we work for still drips on the toilet seat.”

“They all drip,” I said. “And any woman can get any man she wants if she doesn’t care if he stays past the good part.”

Dierdre put her hands up. “Hey, don’t get defensive.”

“Then don’t be offensive. Christ. If I had a nickel for every woman who told me I wasn’t like the rest of you, I’d have all the nickels. Speaking of which”—I nudged the vial toward her—“that’ll be fifty bucks.”

Dierdre picked up her purse. “Look, I’m sorry if I was rude. Again. But women like you don’t understand what it’s like to get your heart smashed in a million pieces.”

Right, I thought, but then decided it wasn’t worth it. Dierdre had done me a favor by pissing me off; I was going to enjoy taking her money now, no guilt.

“So,” she said, motioning to the vial, “I drink this on Friday, and the next time I see Wally…?”

“You have to see him within twenty-four hours, and if he’s the one, then you’ll see a glow around him, like an aura.”

“What color will it be?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Blue, maybe.” I couldn’t be sure what Dierdre would see. Liv saw blue when she tested it for me with her man, Tobias. I was taking her word for it.

“And if I see nothing?” she asked.

“Then he’s not The One.”

She stared at the vial, deep in thought. I glanced up to look for Liv, but she was by the front door, talking to two men. One, I could tell from the shiny back of his bald-ass head, was my brother Nick. The other guy was a little taller, a little thinner, with dark brown hair that looked like it had been cut with a weed wacker. One of Nick’s friends in for the wedding? That wasn’t until Saturday, though. Seemed a little early for—

“Okay. What the hell, right?” Dierdre opened her wallet. Then the guy with my brother turned to glance around the restaurant, and the rest of my world shut down.

There, existing in my world as if he had the goddamn right, was Leo North.

He looked so different. Older. But, he also looked exactly the same, that lopsided face and pointy chin and permanent five o’clock shadow and the big, stupid nose. I had kissed that nose, a thousand times. Marked it. It was my goddamned nose and he had taken it with him, the bastard.

My breath stuck in my chest and I couldn’t get it out. My stomach flipped. I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

But mostly, more than anything in the world, I wanted to sink down under the table and hide until closing.

“Easter?” Dierdre snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Easter, if you’re going to hurl, aim that way, okay? This is a new skirt and I’m on a teacher’s salary.”

I blinked a few times, and my breath started to work again. My surroundings returned and the panic hit and I slumped down in the booth.

“Easter?” I must have looked pretty bad, because she almost looked concerned.

“You don’t have an umbrella or anything, do you?” I whispered.

Dierdre stared at me. “It’s not raining. Why the hell would I have an umbrella?”

I swallowed. “Maybe he’ll leave. Maybe I can just wait here and he won’t notice me.”

“Are you about to have an emotional thing? I’m not good with that. Let me get Liv.” She raised her hand to motion toward Liv at the front of the restaurant.

“What are you doing?” I sat up and grabbed her hand, pushing it down to the table top, then grabbed one of the menus from the holder behind the napkin dispenser and held it up in front of my face.

“Crap, crap, crap, crap,” I said, peering up over the menu.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dierdre said, following my line of sight. “Is that Leo North? You know, he’s one of the few students I ever actually liked. Hey, North!” She waved in the air.

I let the menu flop down and stared at her. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why would you do that?”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

I released a breath, pushing the panic away. If I couldn’t escape, I had to be cool. I put both hands lazily on either side of my coffee mug as Leo walked over. He was smiling at Dierdre, his affable, unassuming manner so unchanged, even after all this time. He was the kind of guy no one looked at twice, so incredibly ordinary and average in every way except…

…except that he was Leo, and that made him permanently, irrevocably, the most special man in the world. At least my world.

He laughed. “Ms. Troudt? Hey! Good to see you.”

Dierdre got up from her side of the booth and shook his hand, and she happened to angle herself away from me, which angled him to face me, and our eyes met and he froze. I was stuck, unable to dart away without drawing attention, so I gave a quick wave. He seemed to choke a little on nothing, the air I guess, and then Dierdre released his hand and he took a moment to pull his eyes off of me and make eye contact with her again. It was enough time for her to look at me, then at him, then back at me.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” She nudged Leo on the shoulder. “We know. She’s pretty. Stop staring.” She turned to me and gave a cocky quirk of her brow, as if to say, Told you so. I couldn’t work up a reaction, and she turned back to Leo.

“Hey, didn’t you run off to become priest or something?”

“Yes,” Leo said, his voice still a little choked. “I… uh… yeah.”

“So, where the hell have you been?”

“South Dakota,” I said.

Dierdre looked at me, and for a moment, she seemed to finally pick up on the fact that something was going on here.

“South Dakota. Wow.” She shifted her focus to Leo. “What brings you back here?”

Leo cleared his throat. “Um, Nick and Peach’s wedding, actually,” he said, not taking his eyes off me. I don’t know how long we froze there, just staring at each other, but it was long enough for Dierdre to notice and become uncomfortable.

“Yeah, I’m done here.” She reached out to me, putting a fifty dollar bill in my hand, and then swiped the vial off the table and tucked it into her purse. “I’ve got to get going. Those mouth-breathers in summer school aren’t going to terrify themselves. See you guys later.”

It took a moment for Leo to respond, but then he smiled at Dierdre and nodded. “Right.”

She shot one last look at me, rolled her eyes and left. Leo slid into the seat she’d vacated. We stared at each other in silence for a while, and I wanted to kick him in the shins under the table and throw myself into his arms and cry. At the same time.

“So, Father Leo,” I said, keeping my voice as cool and light as I could. “Nick said you weren’t coming in for the wedding. Did you change your mind? Are you officiating now or something?”

“You don’t need to call me Father,” he said.

“You’re not wearing your collar.”

He released a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m aware of that.”

“Are you allowed to not wear it? Isn’t that against the rules or something?”

“Stacy—”

“Seems like the kind of thing that would be against the rules. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to mass, but as I recall, they’ve got rules for pretty much everything.”

“Stacy.” He reached across the table and touched the tips of his fingers tentatively to mine. Instantly, as if on their own power, our fingers intertwined, so naturally, as if ten years hadn’t gone by without a hint of contact. He smiled. “It’s good to see you again.”

I stared at him. My heart was pounding and my legs felt wobbly and I kinda wanted to throw up, but I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t get up and walk away. It felt too good to be connected to him again, like water after so many years in the desert I’d forgotten what water was, let alone how much I needed it.

“Don’t let it be too good to see me,” I said. “I’m very sure that’s against the rules.”

One side of his mouth quirked up a bit; his eyes focused on our hands. “I left.”

I didn’t feel a response to that at all, although I knew I would later. I would feel all of this later, it was going to haunt me for days if not weeks if not months if not forever, but for the moment, a strange calm was settling over me. The wave was huge and hovering over my head, but for the moment I was dry in the curl of it, although it was inevitably going to crash on me. The only question was when.

“You left the priesthood?”

“No,” he said. “I left before it got that far.”

“You were gone ten years.”

“Takes a long time to become a priest.”

I stared at him, not sure how to process it all. I hadn’t really thought about it too much. A few months after Leo disappeared, Nick had said he went off to become a priest, and I had told him never to talk to me about Leo again, and he hadn’t. All this time, I’d thought it was done, flick of the switch.

“Wow,” I said, marveling at it all. “When did you leave? Why?”

“Three years ago.”

“Three years?” I felt a little dizzy. “And what? You don’t write, you don’t call?”

“I needed some time,” he said. “I had a lot of stuff to figure out.”

“I bet. Why’d you leave?”

He released a breath. “It’s… complicated.”

“Everything’s complicated,” I said. “Don’t think. Just answer. Why’d you leave?”

He met my eyes and smiled, but it was a small, sad smile. “I guess I… kind of lost my faith.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I slapped my free hand over my mouth and spoke from behind my fingers. “I’m sorry. That’s not funny.”

“Sure it is,” he said, smiling, and that was my Leo. Always kind. Always understanding. Always forgiving. Such a good man.

The bastard.

“Still,” I said. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

He met my eyes, and put his other hand over our joined ones. “The shock of this is going to wear off in a minute, and once that happens, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to speak to each other.”

“Why wouldn’t we be able to speak to each other?”

He shrugged. “You’re going to be mad. And you get… you know. Kind of hard to reach when you’re mad.”

“I’m not going to be mad. I was mad. I was livid. You missed that part.” I let out the most awkward and unconvincing laugh of my twenty-nine years. “Dude, don’t flatter yourself. I’m over it. What’s your name again?”

He kept his eyes on mine. My throat felt tight and my vision was going dark at the edges; he was the only thing in the world all of a sudden, just Leo smiling at me, and for that split second, everything was like it used to be.

And then Liv showed up and refilled my coffee mug and Leo released my hand and a brick wall of pain hit me in the face. It was almost funny. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, and not touching him hurt. What the hell was that about?

“Hey,” Liv said, watching me carefully. “I’m sorry. It’s been really busy. Is your coffee cold?”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My heart had stopped beating.

“Leo, so good to see you again,” Liv said quickly. “I think you should go now.”

Liv’s protectiveness was so stark, it almost made me laugh. Of course, she would be protective; she had been the one to peel me up off the floor when Leo first left, and she’d had to practically nurse me through that first year. She had invested a lot of energy in gluing me back together, and there was no way in hell she was going to let Leo North knock me into a million shards again. She stood at my side of the booth, her arms crossed and her stance wide, her long dark curls flowing over her shoulders, making her look like a warrior goddess. Hell, even the empty circular tray under her arm looked like a shield, and her message was clear.

Olivia Kiskey was not a woman you messed with.

“Yeah,” Leo said, and he seemed barely able to get the word out.

And then, he was gone.

Liv slid into the seat where he’d been and leaned over the table. “I called Brenda. She’ll be here to cover for me in fifteen minutes, then I’m taking you home and we’ll talk, okay?” She reached out and touched my hands. “Are you okay?”

“What?” I made a dismissive gesture with one numbed arm, and my hand flopped awkwardly at the end of my wrist. “I’m fine.” I felt my left eyelid twitch, but Liv didn’t see it. She was glancing behind her at the clock.

She turned back to face me. “Fifteen minutes. I swear, and then I’m coming for you.”

“Yeah, great,” I said. The bells on the front door chimed again, followed by some gasps in the dining room, so I looked up. Peach was in her wedding dress, looking like Bridezilla Barbie, with Eleanor Cotton, the dressmaker, cursing and holding up armfuls of skirt and train as best she could. Peach glanced around, one hand holding her veil to her platinum blonde head, the other clutched around her phone. It took a moment of glancing around, but then she saw us and darted over, dragging Eleanor in her wake.

“Oh, thank God!” Peach said. “I was at my fitting when I got the text from Nick!”

“No kidding,” Liv said flatly, and I would have laughed if I had it in me. I was still, for the moment, huddled in the curl of the wave, awaiting the crash.

Peach put her hand flat on the table, leaned over toward me and whispered, “Leo’s in town. He just showed up. He RSVP’d that he wasn’t coming, then calls Nick this morning from the airport. I swear, I didn’t know until just now, or I would have told you.”

“Fuck!” Eleanor said and stuck her thumb in her mouth, apparently bitten by one of the thousand pins in Peach’s dress. She glared at Peach. “I’m raising my fee.”

Peach waved a dismissive hand at her, but kept her eyes on me. “Did you hear me? Leo’s in town.”

“We know,” Liv said. “He was just here.”

Peach straightened, her eyes locked on me in alarm. “Oh. God. Stace. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I forced a brittle laugh that sounded hollow even to my own ears.

Liv pushed up from the table. “I really have to go. Brenda will be here soon and we’ll go back to my place, okay?”

“Okay,” Peach said. “I’ll stay here with you until Liv’s ready, and we’ll all go.”

“You’re not going anywhere in that goddamned dress,” Eleanor said, amping up the Brooklyn in her accent.

Peach turned on her. “Can’t you see we’re in crisis here?”

Eleanor narrowed her eyes. For a seamstress, she was pretty scary. “You wanna be in crisis? Try going somewhere in that dress.”

“Really,” I said. “Guys, I’m fine. It was ten years ago. Stop making such a big deal out of it.”

Liv looked at me, nibbling her lip, and Peach crossed her arms over her middle. They glanced at each other doubtfully, and I managed to get up from the table all by myself, which I thought was pretty impressive.

“I have a load of work to do,” I said, stepping around Peach’s huge dress. “And I’m tired. I think I might nap.” I kissed Peach on the cheek. “Thanks for coming so fast.” I patted Eleanor on the shoulder. “Sorry for the inconvenience.” I reached out and squeezed Liv’s hand, pressing the fifty dollar bill from Dierdre Troudt into her palm. “I’ll call you later.”

They might have responded to me; I don’t know. As I walked out of Crazy Cousin Betty’s, I couldn’t hear anything but a big, crashing wave.