“The curse is what happened. Scoff all you like. I used to. Franklin Cabot was handsome, wealthy, kind, courteous—all the things a young man should be. So I ignored the stories I’d grown up with, the warnings of my own parents, and married him. Had his child. For the first decade, all was as it should be.” Her voice softened for a moment, like she was remembering what it had been like to be happy. “Then the dreams began.”

Mateo wished the butler had brought in another chair for him to sit on. “Dreams?”

“He thought they showed him the future. Or so he claimed. I noticed he never mentioned these predictions until after they’d come to pass. At first I thought it was no more than a mania—a terror of becoming what his mother had been before him—and that he would get over it. I told him all would be well. But he became more and more fixated on the dreams. Stayed up for days on end in an effort to keep himself from dreaming.”

He remembered that—the way Mom would pace for hours at night, and how he’d laid awake, pretending he didn’t hear her, that everything was actually okay.

Grandma, oblivious to Mateo’s unease, kept talking. “Your grandfather’s frenzies became worse and worse. Then came that day when he was up in the attic with the old oil lantern, and I dared to interrupt his ranting and pacing. That was the day he did this and set the rafters on fire.” She put two fingers to her ravaged cheek. “They acted faster to save the house than to save my face.”

Sleep deprivation could drive anyone crazy, Mateo figured. Maybe that was all it was. “That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Generation after generation, the Cabots try to convince themselves of that. And generation after generation, they’re wrong. I tried to end it with your mother, you know. I told her never to marry or have children, and for so long she obeyed. Then your father moved to town when she was forty—even I thought it might be safe by that point—but here you are.” Grandma leaned back in her chair, as though exhausted; this was probably the most talking she’d done in a year. “You can break the cycle, Mateo. You can end this by refusing to father children. Don’t adopt, either. It will only be crueler for them when you go mad.”

“I won’t.” The words came out louder than Mateo meant for them to, so loud that her eyes widened. He tried again. “I mean, it’s not going to happen to me.”

“But it will,” she said quite calmly. “You are the only one of your generation. There is no rescuing you.” Her bony hand reached out to ring the small silver bell that summoned the butler. “A pity, really. You were such a lovely child.”

Then she turned back to her window, and the butler came, and there was nothing for Mateo to do but leave, even more freaked out than he’d been before.