The curse

Secret

“Why are you guys here?” Daisy asked weakly as she pushed herself up in the narrow hospital bed. The room still smelled faintly of antiseptic and jasmine; sunlight from the curtained window striped the floor in pale lines. Her hair was a tangle; her cheek prickled from the towel her mother had dabbed across it. For a long moment she simply blinked, trying to put together the sharp, disjointed edges of the night.

“I have your spare keys and passcodes, remember?” Jessy replied, hovering at the foot of the bed with that mixture of practical calm and fierce affection Daisy had come to rely on. “I flew in as soon as I heard. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here when David—” Her voice broke.

Daisy closed her eyes. The name was small and fragile now; she felt too raw to repeat the story of it aloud. “It’s okay,” she whispered instead.

“You don’t have to end your life,” Jessy said, more steadily. “You’re not alone, D. Mum made some soup. Sit up and eat. We’ll get you through this.”

Her mother sat at the bedside, her face pinched with fatigue and grief. She pressed a spoonful of soup toward Daisy with trembling hands. “Eat,” she insisted. “Please, baby—eat a little. You must try.”

Daisy accepted the spoon out of habit at first, the broth warm and simple. Her body had been empty for days; the act of swallowing felt like something ordinary to cling to. Her mother watched her with wet eyes, murmuring apologies between tiny bites. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

When Jessy’s phone vibrated, she glanced down and then up with a small apologetic smile. “I have to rush out and get the kids to bed. They haven’t seen me in weeks. I’ll be back early tomorrow with them. I promise.” She kissed Daisy briefly on the forehead, hugged her mother, and slipped out, leaving the two women alone.

No sooner had the door clicked shut than Daisy sat up with a new urgency. “Mum,” she said, voice frayed, “I can’t wait any longer. What is happening to me? Do you know anything? Please—tell me.”

Her mother inhaled slowly, as though preparing herself to travel back through memory. For a long moment she said nothing. Then, gently, she began to speak.

“It was your grandmother who told me,” she said, rubbing her thumb along the edge of the blanket as if the motion would steady both of them. “I remember that afternoon like it was yesterday. You were twenty—young and bright-eyed. Your grandmother called me into the parlor and she sat me down. She took my hands and—God, she looked so small that day—and she told me a story she had been given.”

Daisy’s throat tightened. “A story?”

“A story, yes,” her mother agreed. “But not a story you were meant to just laugh about at the dinner table. She spoke of how our family came to prosperity. She spoke of bargains made long ago by people who believed they had no choice—agreements cut in desperation.” Her mother’s fingers trembled slightly. “She warned me, too. She said the words I was to pass on when the time came. She left instructions in writing. I swore to myself I would never see my daughter—my child—undergo what she described. I swore I would never let that happen to you.”

Daisy listened, a low hum of panic building beneath her ribs. “So it’s true,” she said. Her voice came out small and incredulous. “The dreams—this deity—this thing in red… It’s not just on my mind?”

Her mother swallowed. “People have always told bedtime tales,” she said, “and some of them are exactly that—fables to frighten children into staying in line. But there are histories recorded in the old family ledgers, in letters, in the papers your grandmother kept. There were people, your ancestors, who were starving, desperate. They approached the kind of woman who lives at the edges of the town—someone who knew rites and old ways. They were promised riches, crops that would not fail, mills humming with sugar again. They regained prosperity. But those years of plenty came with a clause…a dreadful one.”

Daisy’s hand went to her mouth to steady herself. Her pulse thudded in her ears. “What clause?”

Her mother hesitated. “That every female child—every daughter in their line—would be ‘dedicated’ first. The ritual would be performed, secretly. Your grandmother swore she had done it simply as a duty, that it was a superstition that faded with time. She tried to turn the family away from it, to believe she could close that book. Yet the stories persisted. You heard them as a child at your grandmother’s knee: myths about a red-clad figure that tempered fortune and misfortune. Your grandmother told me it was an ugly superstition. She begged me to refuse it for you.”

“How…” Daisy’s voice broke. “How could they—why would anyone—”

“Desperation,” her mother said flatly. “When you’re starving and the mills have failed and the letters from the creditors are stamped in red ink, people who would never bow to anything will bargain. They sign with blood because they are terrified of death. They do it for their children. They do it for survival.”

Daisy’s mouth went dry. “Are you saying what I dream about—what I saw—was real? The thing…it appears to me. It calls me. It says it is owed. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want wealth that demands a daughter in exchange.” The words rushed out, a tremor under each one.

Her mother’s eyes shone with sorrow and an odd, terrible steadiness. “I didn’t want to tell you,” she said quietly. “Because telling you felt like passing a poison cup. But yes—there is documentation. There are still names in the ledgers. And your grandmother—before she died—insisted I should be warned. She told me the ritual is performed in secret. She told me those who break their vows find misfortune; she told me that some in our line believed they were protected only because each succeeding generation kept quiet, kept the promise.”

Daisy’s breath hitched. “But I never—” She groped for the memory of her grandmother’s voice, the warm parlor with tea cups and the smell of lemon peel. “I never had any ceremony. I never—”

“That may be so.” Her mother’s hand found Daisy’s and squeezed. “But rituals are not the only way history repeats. Sometimes stories shape what people believe, and those beliefs change actions. I don’t have all the answers, D. I only know that the past is stubborn. It has a way of reaching into the present if you let it.”

Tears spilled down Daisy’s cheeks—less in release now than in the weight of sudden comprehension. “So the deaths,” she whispered. “My first husband, then David—are you saying they might have been consequences of this pact?”

Her mother flinched, pain flickering across her face. “We don’t know. We never had a test, an explanation. We have grief and rumors and old ledgers and a family that doesn’t speak of this. That silence has been its own kind of complicity.”

Daisy closed her eyes and pictured the two funerals, the quiet graves, the roses piled high. Her stomach rolled with nausea. “I don’t want to be part of this. I want a normal life. I want children. I want—” She could not finish the sentence without choking on it.

“Then we will fight it,” her mother said, surprising both of them with the ferocity in her voice. “I will find the papers. I will speak to the elders. Jessy will help. We will get a lawyer. We will not be bullied by old superstitions. We will not accept fear and force.”

Daisy looked up, bewildered but in some fragile way steadied by her mother’s resolve. The room hummed with ordinary noise: distant traffic, the soft click of hospital machines. Outside, life went on.

“If it’s a legacy of deals made in the dark,” her mother continued, “we will bring it into the light. Secrets rot when they’re kept. We will find the truth, and we will choose how to move forward.”

Daisy let out a long, shaky breath. Anger flared—hot, clarifying. “Then start,” she said, voice small but sharp. “Start now. Tell me what you know. I don’t want to be a victim of a story from the past.”

Her mother nodded and reached for the drawer, pulling out a thin, leather-bound box—papers, brittle with age. “It’s not simple,” she warned. “But we will not give up.”

For the first time in days, Daisy felt a thread of something that resembled hope. It was thin and fragile, but it existed. She would not surrender to the hush of the past. If there was a pact, they would question it. If there were records, they would read them. And if something in her blood demanded a sacrifice, she would face it not alone but with the women who had come for her—the mother who would not lie, the friend who would not leave, and the stubborn desire in Daisy herself to live on.

The sun climbed a little higher outside the window, bleaching the room in pale gold. It felt like permission to try.