Page 14 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland

Spirit loves a curious cat.

—Evie Oxby, Cat Fancy

If Beatrice didn’t know better, she’d think Astrid—she couldn’t think of her as her mother—was trying to get her drunk.

“More wine?” Astrid asked sweetly for the third time.

Again, Beatrice covered her glass with her hand. “I’m really okay.”

“Mom,” hissed Cordelia. “No means no.”

Minna took another piece of chicken off the platter. “What we’re looking for is enthusiastic consent, Grandma.”

Astrid snapped, “I don’t know what that means. Everyone’s so careful with their drinking now, but I always say if you’re not an alcoholic by forty, you’ll never be one!” She raised her eyebrows at Beatrice. “I can’t remember if your father had addiction in his family?”

In a tired voice, Cordelia said, “Please leave her alone.”

Beatrice had no intention of answering the question. Astrid’s sour attitude was okay, though. Kind of funny, honestly. Maybe she felt that way because she was sitting in her sister’s house.

To be precise, she was sitting in her sister’s gigantic house.

The inside matched its gorgeous outside, with huge rooms lined in dark wooden bookshelves.

The air smelled of rosemary and garlic from the chicken, and underneath, dust and candle wax.

Every spare surface held something interesting: a yellow vase painted with a red hummingbird, a saucer that contained three bone-white rocks, a rusty harmonica, two corgi figurines so small they could both sit in a child’s hand.

In front of her sat an unexpected home-cooked meal.

When she’d texted earlier to confirm where she would take them for dinner, Cordelia had texted back, I’ve already got a chicken brining, and I got the prettiest sweet potatoes at the farmer’s market.

We both had a strange birthday yesterday—let’s celebrate being forty-five tonight!

So now, Beatrice sat at a rustic farmhouse table marred with the nicks of everyday life, surrounded by her very own family.

Cordelia was obviously used to entertaining, comfortably throwing the roasted vegetables into an orange bowl and sliding the platter of carved chicken, still steaming, onto the table. Candles, dozens of them, scattered dancing shadows around the room as the sun set outside.

But a thin tension hung above the candlelight, perfectly invisible but still noticeable.

Did they, too, feel the strangeness, the bigness of this?

Beatrice peered at her sister and her niece through it, and they peered back, and that was why she didn’t want any more wine.

One glass was enough—she needed to keep her mind focused.

So far, Minna had carried much of the conversation, affirming the unspoken agreement the adults had made to let her do it.

First, she tried to insist that Beatrice stay in the room for rent, but Beatrice rejected this in no uncertain terms. She’d booked into a three-star bed-and-breakfast and dropped her bag on the way to Cordelia’s, glad to be in a completely neutral place.

Minna eventually let the idea drop, and then she chattered about a Cooper’s hawk she’d seen in the woods on her way home from the library, where apparently she volunteered in the summer.

She shared opinions about two kids who had been caught smoking weed in the library bathroom—one of the boys’ mothers was a librarian and she’d been livid.

Minna hoped neither of the boys would be in her homeroom in August because they were idiots.

“They think that trans kids don’t really exist. Also that manga is a foodstuff. ”

Beatrice’s stomach tightened, but Cordelia said easily, “They don’t sound smart enough to read manga. You okay, poppet?”

Minna nodded, her face relaxed. “Totally. Haters just help me know who to avoid at lunch.”

Was being different that easy for her? It couldn’t be. Could it?

Minna shifted into peppering Beatrice with questions, but they were easy ones that she could answer without taking her attention from the way Cordelia’s face moved and how the lines around Astrid’s eyes creased deeper as she laughed with Minna.

I have a Mini Cooper , Beatrice said. Red.

Yes, it’s a convertible. No, I don’t cook much.

My favorite ice cream flavor is peanut butter chocolate.

Beatrice tried to ignore the emotions that kept sneaking into her heart.

Yes, she was deeply angry with Astrid in ways she knew she probably couldn’t even understand yet.

But that was something for another day. Tonight was for fact-finding.

Anger would only get in the way. She wanted to study each one of these people, making mental notes of each quirk and tic so she could look at them later under the microscope of memory.

Should she tell them about Winnie’s prediction? About what Evie said?

No. She didn’t believe it herself—why worry them with something so ridiculous?

Minna said, “Why don’t you have any children?”

Whoo. When she married Grant, she was so hopeful that his boys would love her, that they’d make one big happy family.

After Josh and Lucas moved to live with their mother, she talked Grant into trying for a baby, not an easy sell.

She had a miscarriage at fifteen weeks. What a lightweight phrase for something that had sent her to bed for a month.

Grant hadn’t wanted to try again. She’d been fine with that.

Okay, mostly fine.

She laced her fingers in her lap. “Never got around to it.”

“Do you still want to have one? How old are you?” Minna laughed. “Oh, ha. You’re forty-five, duh.” She raised her fork high, not seeming to notice the piece of sweet potato that bounced off it and onto the wooden tabletop.

“When’s your birthday?”

Minna didn’t fall for it. “Forty-five is old, but not too old. Halle Berry had Maceo when she was forty-seven, and she swears it was a surprise.”

Cordelia gaped at her. “How do you even know that?”

“Googling to see if you were too old to give me a sister.”

Pressing her hand to her chest, Cordelia said, “Oh, trust me. I am way, way, way too old for that.”

Minna pointed her fork at Beatrice. “So, any plans on that front? I would accept a cousin.”

“No plans. No desire.” Beatrice’s phone buzzed in her pocket, but she ignored it. “If it helps, I’m pretty stoked I just inherited a niece.”

She grinned. “What about pets?”

“None at the moment. But I did used to have a three-legged cat with seven toes on each paw.”

“Whaaaat?” The way Minna’s face scrunched up in confused delight set off fireworks in Beatrice’s chest.

Her phone buzzed again, and then once more. “I’m sorry, I don’t usually look at my phone at the table.”

Cordelia pulled her knitting out of the pocket of her apron and made a go-on motion with her hand as Astrid tsssk ed.

Grant: there was a fire -

Beatrice’s heart froze solid in her chest.

everything’s okay, Josh put the air fryer too close to a pizza box and forgot about it but your dad was going by on a walk and saw the smoke coming from the window and went in

She couldn’t stab the screen fast enough. Is he okay?

I’m on my way home now, Josh says it went out on its own but he used the fire ext so I’m sure it’s a huge mess. Yr dad doesn’t need to come in anymore, can u pls tell him to give me the key back

The image of the house she’d drawn in the sand rose in her mind. The flames around it.

A warring text came in from her father. Grant’s idiot son almost burned your old house down. We have to get your important paperwork out of there. I can get it all for you, just tell me where it is. I still have the key.

Carefully, Beatrice swiped away her father’s text.

Then she typed back to Grant, Tell him yourself.

“Is everything okay?” Cordelia’s fingers twitched as she added more stitches to whatever it was she was knitting.

Beatrice tapped the Do Not Disturb button and slipped her phone back into her pocket. “Small fire. Dad, um, helped, and it’s apparently all okay.”

“Losing the plot, is he?” said Astrid with satisfaction. “Unsurprising.”

Screw that—no matter how angry she was, this woman didn’t get to criticize him. Only Beatrice had earned that particular right. “He’s the smartest person I know.”

Astrid narrowed her eyes and stared at her. “We all knit. Do you?” She made the abrupt change in subject sound like an accusation.

“No.”

“I’ll teach you.”

Beatrice had always wanted to learn, but she’d rather learn from a YouTube video in a language she didn’t understand than learn from this woman, who had broken her heart by dying and, then again, by being alive.

Cordelia placed her knitting on the table and stood. “Beatrice, would you mind helping me in the kitchen?”

Minna leaped up. “I’ll help, too! I’ve got to hear about the three-legged cat.”

Touching her daughter’s face, Cordelia said, “Thanks, lovey, but you pulled back the curtain on my crafty ruse. I’m just trying to get her alone for a minute.”

Minna sighed, but sat.

In the kitchen, Cordelia held up a bottle of mineral water. “Yeah?”

“Please.” The kitchen was as welcoming as the rest of the house.

Colorful bowls and well-used-looking kitchen tools covered the long counters.

The walls were blue and purple, and violet gingham curtains hung at the large window that looked out into the garden, now lit with white twinkle lights.

A honey jar and three boxes of tea sat next to the blue-and-white crockery, stacked in friendly piles on a mosaic-tiled island, and a slab of yellow butter rested on a matching plate.

Cordelia poured the sparkling water into a green glass. “Mom can be a bit much. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“So can Minna, obviously.”

“She’s perfect.”

Cordelia’s expression softened. “She is.” She handed the glass to Beatrice, and then leaned against the island. Her hair swung forward to hide her face, her white stripe bright under the rustic wagon wheel chandelier.

Beatrice waited.

Cordelia’s shoulders rose once, and then again, before she raised her face. “Do you remember the mirror?”

“The mirror?” Beatrice could have sworn that as the words left her mouth, she had no idea what her sister meant, but by the time they hit the air, she did.

When she’d been very small, all the mirrors in her father’s house were boring, everyday mirrors, showing her the plain old Beatrice she saw every night as she brushed her teeth in front of the toothpaste-spattered glass.

That mirror, though, the one hidden at the back of the closet—that one was special.

It had been round and chipped at the edges like a mouse had been nibbling at it in the dark.

The closet light overhead had been just right, dim and yellow, so that when she’d crawled in to sit in front of the mirror and talk to herself, she could imagine that the little girl she saw was someone else.

A real friend, someone who laughed when Beatrice laughed and seemed to love Beatrice’s stuffed elephant as much as she had.

Her little friend that no one else could see, the one she’d chatted to in the mirror so long ago. “Oh, my god.”

“You do remember the mirror.”

“That wasn’t real.”

Cordelia just raised an eyebrow.

Beatrice reached out to lean on the counter. “Holy… shit.”

“Yeah.”

“It was round, and kind of worn, like the glass itself was rusted somehow. And you—”

Cordelia nodded. “I was there. You were, too, on the other side.”

“No.” The girl Beatrice had babbled to in the mirror hadn’t been real. It had been a reflection. A small face, just like hers.

But the lips had moved with words Beatrice herself hadn’t said, and if she leaned as close as she could, she could hear the girl speak.

Can I see Mrs. Lumpy? Beatrice would hold up her old stuffed elephant and the girl in the mirror would laugh, then she would laugh, and it didn’t matter that they never said much of anything.

It was enough to be able to see her. “No.”

Cordelia’s gaze was soft. “The elephant. Do you still have it?”

“This isn’t possible.”

“Miss Lumps. Ms. Plumpy?”

Something crashed inside her lungs. “Mrs. Lumpy.”

“That’s it.” Cordelia’s face fell. “What happened? Where did you go?”

“Daddy broke the mirror.”

Astrid’s voice came from the doorway. “That idiot. That is exactly why I took Cordelia and ran. Breaking my best scrying mirror. Never could take a spot of magic, that man.”