“Are you so lost you’ve forgotten how time works in the worlds outside of the Dead Woods?” said Lucinda. “Time is a construct, and in order to understand it mortals need to see it in a straight line, even though for us all time lines are happening concurrently. For James, his story came before Lady Tremaine’s, and her story came before Cruella’s. How else would Cruella’s father have found the earrings, and the Book of Fairy Tales, and Lord and Lady Tremaine find the brooch?”

“Are you not contented by all you have destroyed in the Many Kingdoms that you have to lure victims from distant lands to do the same to them with your deceit? First Cruella, then Lady Tremaine, and now James.” Circe was exhausted, and heartbroken that even now with her mother locked away she was still trying to undo the damage they caused.

“We tried to help Lady Tremaine. We gave her the power to protect her heart. If not for the brooch she would have crumbled into despair, and she would have never had the courage to rid herself of that horrible man,” said Lucinda.

Circe saw some truth in that. Even if the logic was twisted, she understood why her mother felt that way.

“You mean you will try to help her,” said Circe.

“Have, will, it’s all the same, Circe. All time happens at once, you most of all know this to be true, even though you seem to resist it,” said Lucinda, sneering at her daughter. Circe missed how it was when she was in the Place Between with her mothers. She had sacrificed herself to make her mothers whole again. She had broken her cousin Snow White’s heart by leaving the world of the living in order to save the Many Kingdoms so she and everyone else Circe loved could live, and she finally had her mothers back. They were the women they would have been had they not given Circe the best parts of themselves to create her all those years ago. Their times in the Place Between were the happiest in her memory, and she wanted those days with Lucinda, Ruby, Martha, and their cat, Pflanze, to last forever. She would have loved to spend eternity sitting in their old house at the kitchen table with the view of Grimhilde’s apple tree in the large, round window, laughing with her mothers, finally and truly enjoying their company, because they were at last the women they were meant to be, not the twisted monsters they became after giving those pieces of themselves away. But it wasn’t their fate. It all went terribly wrong, and now there was nothing between them but resentment and heartbreak.