Grandma isn’t looking at me like I saw a ghost; she’s looking at me like I am the ghost. “No. I mean, not just romantic. This time, the end isn’t just bad or embarrassing, it’s… The guy I met yesterday, he—he’s going to die.”
She gasps, but quickly regains her parental composure. “Oh, Quinn. Oh.”
I nod, my eyes burning with the desire to cry. “I want to tell him. Maybe if he has some warning, he could—”
“Quinn…”
Frustrated tears threaten to fall. “But I have to do something! I can’t just let him die.”
“No,” Grandma says too loudly, too sharply. She clears her throat and says it again in a softer tone. “No. You can’t tell him. You can never tell anyone about what you see in your visions. Do you understand?” She pauses, holding my gaze until I respond with a nod. “It’s hard to carry all that knowledge around, isn’t it? To know things you shouldn’t?”
“It’s…awful,” I manage, yet it feels like an understatement.
“Exactly. We are the unlucky ones who must shoulder the weight. That is our duty. What kind of person would you be if you allowed everyone else to experience that burden, too?”
“It’s just that I think—”
“Wait, now. Let me finish.” She grabs my wrist gently and looks straight into my eyes. “Listen to me. Truly listen. What kind of life will this boy have if he spends the rest of it knowing how he’s going to die?”
A coldness works its way through my body. Grandma Ruth is right. I wouldn’t want death consuming Griffin day in and day out.
With a heavy breath, I let my head roll forward. There has to be a way—there must be a loophole or something. Surely no one has tried everything in their attempts to change the future. “I’m supposed to do nothing, is that it?”
“Not nothing. You can do whatever you choose. You don’t have to see this boy ever again if that’s what you wish. Whatever you do, dear, the outcome will be the same.”
I already knew this, but God, it’s still hard to hear.
“Have you ever seen someone die in a vision—watched the light leave someone’s eyes while…while…”
“You cannot change the future,” she adds. “The sooner you accept that, the better off you will be.”
“You make it sound like I bombed a chemistry test. Have you never seen something so gut-wrenchingly horrible before in a vision?”
She swallows visibly but sits a bit straighter. My mom never liked talking about the curse, and Grandma doubled down on her dislike after my parents died. “No. I’ve not seen anything like that.”
“But I’m supposed to go on eating and breathing, knowing he’ll die? Is that what you would do?”
She bristles. “Quinn. You can’t—”
“Can’t change the future, yeah,” I mutter, a pounding starting in my temples. That’s not how life works—that’s not how the curse works. “Not everything ends with happiness.”
She fidgets with a gold ring on her right hand and inhales slowly. “You’re right. But everything does end. Including the bad.”
Her words have me glancing sideways at her, feeling a sardonic desire to laugh. “Is that supposed to be uplifting or something?”
She smiles faintly. “What I mean is everything, good or bad, comes to an end. Like that old saying goes, this too shall pass. If you can learn to harness that thought process and become, in a way, unattached, you’ll find a way to accept things as they come. The good and the bad. You can learn to accept life as it happens, without fear that it will end. Because everything will end. Every single thing. But if you continue through your days worrying about that ending, you’re only wasting the possibilities of each unique day.”
“That sounds like a poorly written Hallmark card. Are you trying to say I worry too much?”
“In a way.” Grandma sets her book down on the coffee table and scoots a few inches closer to me. “I know you’ve had it rough. Losing your parents…well, that’s always hard, no matter how old you are. It’s even harder to lose them at such a young age. I can only imagine how it must be trying to navigate through life in this day and age, with only a rambling grandmother as company.”
I laugh weakly. “I do have friends, you know.”
“Sure. Exactly. But I see a lot of myself in you. I’ve raised a teenage girl once before, and trust me, your mother was a handful at times. She fell down a lot, but she always got back up. Somehow.”
Images of my mom, smiling and so, so alive, spin in my head. I breathe in slowly. “But she didn’t get her happy ending.”
Dying before age fifty is no happy ending.
“In a way, though, she did.”
I blink at Grandma, trying to force away the tears from welling in my eyes. “How in the world do you think that?”
She lays one of her hands against mine, squeezing lightly. Her touch is warm and rough, but I feel the meaning behind the gesture. “She loved your father deeply. She loved you more than anything in the world. Yes, her life was taken from her much too soon, but before she died, she got everything she ever wanted. She loved unconditionally and was surrounded by those who loved her in the same way. At the end of the day, no matter the awfulness of her death, no matter how much it hurt everyone else who had to go on living, I believe she did get her happily ever after.”
I’m unable to look at Grandma’s face. Unable to do anything but blink, not focusing on any one thing. “I miss her,” I whisper.
“Me too, dear. Me too.” She squeezes my hand again.
We sit like this for a long time before she whispers,“If I knew how to break the curse, I’d set you free. You know that, right?”
I nod. Walking away won’t save Griffin, but Grandma’s wrong if she thinks I’ll sit back and let a fate like that happen without even trying to stop it.
It’s been dark for hours, and I’m sitting on the porch in a rickety chair that should’ve been pitched years ago. The Ohio summer weather is pretty perfect for once, like Olivia had said. Not too hot. Not too cold. It’s almost a flipping miracle. But even so, the vision is fresh in my mind. Griffin’s desperate voice is in my ears like I’m stuck half inside the vision, half inside reality.
Grandma Ruth says there’s nothing I can do to change the vision, but I’m not ready to give up. If he’s going to die no matter what, some people might cut all ties with him now to prevent inevitable heartbreak, but what kind of person would that make me? After a few more minutes debating this silently, I decide I’d be the worst kind of person to say screw it and walk away.