Then Father had turned to him and said, unsmiling, “Let’s talk.” He’d walked away from the lines of kids and their parents waiting, past a grove of aspens and pines, and toward Lake Rosetta. It was quieter there, with the excited chaos and laughter like a distant memory behind them.

Grey watched his shoes sink in the soft dirt on the bank of the lake; he felt the afternoon sun warm the back of his neck. He knew whatever this talk was about, it wouldn’t be good. By then he’d already distanced himself from Father, had come to think of him as a relative who sent money for clothes and books and occasionally called, when he remembered to.

Without preamble, his father, never a man of many words, said, “The curse. You know of it, of course. But I think the time has come to tell you the whole truth, Grey. I have every reason to believe that when you turn eighteen, you will die.” He gave Grey the news like a jaded oncologist might tell a cancer patient there was nothing more he could do, that medicine had done its best and still it wasn’t enough. The news was delivered briskly, without warmth, without ambiguity.

Grey stared at him in the bright sunlight, threads of silver in the duke’s hair glinting. The air, smelling of deep water and dark mud and creatures that slithered, unseen, was cloying in his nostrils. “What?”

“Don’t say ‘what.’ It’s very middle-class,” Father said, frowning. “The curse is very clear that our lineage will end. I believe it will end on your eighteenth birthday with your death.”

Grey pushed his shaking hands into his pockets. He nodded, not giving way to the panic that was clashing its incessant cymbals in his ears. He knew he’d get more out of Father if he kept his composure. “So… you think the curse says I’ll die in six years.”

“Yes,” Father said.

“And you believe it.”

“Yes.” His father’s eyes, two ice chips, held his. “I have no reason not to. The curse predicted the storm. It predicted your hand in your mother’s death. You are the last heir it speaks of, Grey.”

“I—”

“Now, let’s get back to the balloons,” Father said, striding away from him, one hand in the pocket of his trousers. “Just a few more hours and we can put this weekend behind us.”

Over the years, Grey had traversed all the many stages of grappling with something like that, over and over again: disbelief, shock, anger, despair, belief, numbness. He’d finally arrived at a nihilism that felt much more manageable. Was the curse real? No one else would understand it except his father, but Grey felt, deep inside his bones, that it was. It was as much a part of him as his title or his blue eyes.