I nod, but going back is the last thing I want to do right now.

“Can I just have a moment to finish this coffee and catch my breath?” I say.

“Sure. It’s just . . .”

“People are going to be worried,” Joe puts in.

I look at Lizzie and Geordie. Of course. The band will be worried. And Cassie must be frantic about Joe.

“Maybe you should take them and then come back,” I say. “I’ll just wait here for you and let everything settle down inside me.”

“I’m not going back without you,” Geordie tells me.

“What’s the real issue here?” Joe asks.

I don’t want to tell him—at least not here, in front of everybody. They already know me at my worst from what I related about my history with Del and Mattie—I gave them the short version, but they all got the picture. I don’t want them to know that I’m a coward as well. Especially not Honey.

But Joe’s got that look in his eye—part worried, part curious, and all obstinate. If there’s something going on with me, he’s not going to let it go until I tell him what it is.

“Okay,” I tell him. “The truth is I’m scared to go back and be, you know, the Broken Girl again.”

Joe shakes his head. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Since you got rid of the crap that was stopping them, the healers can fix you up now, good as new.”

“So, it’s like in the fairy tales.”

“What is?”

“You know,” I say. “Magic can’t ever fix the real problems. In the stories, all the real problems are solved by kindness and pluck, or with a true love’s kiss, with all that kiss means.”

I find myself remembering a line from one of the Jewel CDs that Sophie often plays in the Greenhouse Studio while she’s working. Something about how in the end, there was only kindness.

Kindness implied no expectation of reward, or even necessarily thanks.

It was simply the doing of it that mattered.

“But mostly the kindness,” I say.

“Sure,” Joe says. “I get that. But there’s nothing wrong with using medicine when it can help. There’s no good reason in turning down a helping hand, magical or otherwise.”

Jack nods. “You didn’t see Joe turning Anwatan down when she brought him back from the dead.”

I just look at Joe, speechless for a long moment.

“You . . . you were dead?” I finally manage.

“Yeah, but it didn’t take.”

He’s trying to be all jokey about it, but I can tell he knows it was as big a deal as I think it was.

“Anwatan brought him back,” Jack says, “and the crow girls tidied up his death wound. They can fix you up, as well.”