Page 11 of A Dead Girl's Guide to Living
Would she think less of me for not having fought harder?
Heat crawled up my neck. Shame.
A loud cough startled me, and I cringed in annoyance, scanning the room with sharp, judgmental eyes. A sea of black-clad figures, yet another fuck you to Margaret, who had wanted people in vibrant colors.
I tried to pick out the people who actually knew her.
My mother sat perfectly still beside me, her spine ramrod straight, as if someone had shoved a pole up her ass. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, her dark bob sleek and sharp, not a hair out of place. Her features were stoic, unreadable.
She hadn’t shed a single tear.
I hadn’t really expected her to.
But I had already used up my packet of tissues and had moved on to my sleeves.
They had never been close. They existed like two opposing forces, each always trying—and failing—to bend the other into submission. Like two north-facing magnets, forever repelling one another.
My mother believed in practicality, logic, and structure. Margaret believed in chaos, magic, and knowing things before they happened.
The divide between them had been apparent to me from a young age. Vast and unbridgeable, like a canyon. Now, with Margaret gone, I wasn’t sure if my mother felt relief or loss.
Maybe both.
Ida sat beside me, her head bowed and eyes closed as she endured the façade. I knew her true feelings—hell, she had tried to help me fight Bill on it. We had both failed, yet I knew she ached even more than I did. She had loved Margaret with all her heart, just as she had loved Diana. Now she had lost them both. My gaze shifted to Uncle Bill, and a familiar anger flared as I caught the self-satisfied smirk tugging ever so slightly at the corners of his mouth, his pudgy hands clasped in exaggerated reverence. To an outsider, he might have looked like the grieving son of a beloved mother.
But I knew better.
He had been furious when he found out thatMargaret’s Mystiquehad been left to me. The shop my grandmother had built from the ground up at just twenty. She had started small, traveling with carnivals and psychic fairs before growingMargaret’s Mystiqueinto a brick-and-mortar business where people sought her out, paying for card readings and messages from the dead. Somewhere along the way, she had become a celebrity medium.
But she had never let go of her shop.
And now, it was mine, along with the apartment she owned above it.
Pride surged through me at the thought. She had chosen me. She had trusted me to carry on her legacy.
I had spent years with her, after all. While my mother had been busy chasing her career, I had been offloaded onto Margaret more often than not, but I had never minded.
I had always been in awe of her.
She had taught me the cards, the crystals. I knew them like the back of my hand, lived and breathed them with intention, just as she had taught me.
But I wasn’t a medium.
Not like her.
Not like Ida and Diana. The three of them had found each other years ago and built a family out of nothing, loving one another—and me—as fully and as equally as they could.
Now it was just Ida and me at the store.
Uncle Bill cleared his throat and dabbed at his dry, untouched eyes. I narrowed mine.
He had fought Margaret’s wishes, of course. Yelled. Raged. He had called it unfair. That as her only son, he should have been the one to decide the shop’s fate. That it should be sold, the money split between him and my mother. That I was too young, too irresponsible, and that I would run Margaret’s empire into the ground.
That Ida should havenothing.
But Margaret had been too smart to fall for her son’s bullshit.
The clause in her will had been ironclad. If anyone contested her wishes, they would forfeit their inheritance entirely.
