Chapter 23
I had spent the first twenty years of my life not knowing that magic was real. As I look back, that's kind of ironic. I mean, without that magical compulsion keeping me in my hometown until Cynthia came for me, my life would have been very different.
But it hadn't been a bad life, as I kept reminding myself about a hundred times a day now. I had had an apartment I was just barely affording, but I had never actually missed making rent. The Schneidermans had been constantly pushing food on me, so I never had worries there. And the local library might have been small, but I had been intimate with the mechanics of interlibrary loan by the time I was twelve.
If it hadn't been a particularly happy life, it hadn't been particularly unhappy either.
I couldn't say the same of life af
