After all that had happened, how did a person just return to a normal life? Now that she knew that daemon blood flowed through her, what could normal possible look like? So Lara found herself moving through her day like the walking dead. That first summer was the hardest. She sat out in the field waiting for him. Only he could fix this. Squinting in the sun, she willed him to come. Had she been nothing but a vessel for Cecile? When he failed to show, she thought she had her answer.

Yet she refused to accept things the way they were, and so she kept practicing: starting cars, locking doors, opening drawers, dimming streetlamps, cuing records, until the magic had become as reliable as breathing. While her mother had turned her back on spells, Lara found that she didn’t feel the same. It was as much a part of her as her blond hair. She’d felt the magic there flowing through her veins as she leapt from the trapeze. Nothing in her life had felt that freeing. As she struggled to tell Ben, she found that words didn’t describe the Grand Promenade, the carousel. True, it was Hell, but it was breathtaking and strange. And wasn’t she carved from it?

Everything that Ben thought he knew had been challenged as well. They both moved around each other for a year, like soldiers who’d returned from battle. From the way he hesitated, she knew that Ben was worried about the spaces left by Todd, Marla, and Audrey, even Peter Beaumont, for she’d finally told him about Peter as well. They were two people formed by absences of others. While he never said it, she thought he worried that those who’d remained, including him, were not enough for her. At times, he wasn’t wrong. She was like the mountain that had been formed by the glacier. After it tore through, valleys remained carved like scars. Yet there had been beautiful parts to the story, too. They were in this thing together now, she and Ben, their roots so deep. Early on, there were moments when she was sure the weight of everything would topple them, and yet it hadn’t. He had been a gift through this all, but you didn’t get one without the other. And she’d decided that she was the end of this line. There would be no children for her. While Ben had assured her he understood, she worried that it was a decision he would regret, but then again, he’d been married to a one-hundred-year-old half-daemon, so normal had changed for him as well. She recalled Cecile’s words: It was luck that we are even here. Every day of happiness that we have was more than we were designed for.