The curse

Fractures

Daisy’s mother reached out, voice thick with apology and fear. “Don’t say that, baby. Don’t talk like that.”

“Don’t touch me,” Daisy snapped, more harshly than she intended. The words cut the air like a blade. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you or with this cursed family.”

Her mother recoiled as if struck. Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes. “Daisy, please—”

“I would rather die than marry some monstrous—some thing—called a deity,” Daisy cried, the room suddenly too small for the volume of her grief. Her hands trembled as she spoke. “If I’m gone, there won’t be another generation for him to take. Maybe then this will stop. Maybe then the pattern will end.”

“No, don’t talk like that,” her mother begged, voice cracking. “I can’t lose you. We can—”

“Leave my house this instant,” Daisy snapped. “If you won’t go, I will.” She snatched up her robe and fled up the stairs, each step a drumbeat of panic and resolve. She slammed her bedroom door and locked it, leaning against the heavy wood to keep herself from collapsing.

From the landing, her mother’s sobs came through the door, raw and ragged. “I’m sorry, baby. I’ll fix this. I’ll do anything.”

“Go away!” Daisy shouted back. Then her anger curdled into something colder, steadier: a resourceful, grim clarity that had nothing to do with hope. She pulled her phone off the bedside table with shaking fingers and scrolled through menus she had avoided since David’s death. The funeral home’s number glowed on the screen, a small, mundane thing that suddenly felt like an anchor.

She scheduled the burial for the following week.

It was the kind of practical action that felt oddly good—a way to turn grief into calendar dates and checkboxes. She sent a terse message to family and a handful of friends with the funeral date and a request for privacy. She made one terse call to a trusted event organizer, someone used to handling the logistics of grief with neat, tasteful efficiency, and asked them to coordinate flowers and service details. Then she turned her phone off and pressed it face-down on the nightstand, like a hastily buried secret.

As she stared up at the crystal chandelier—its prisms splintering light across the ceiling—Daisy felt as if the room had tilted. Through the door she could still hear the muffled sound of her mother crying, the steady sob that had become the house’s soundtrack these past weeks. The sound sent another current of guilt through her. If she left now, who would hold the family together? Who would answer the practical questions no one else wanted to touch?

After David’s death, I’ll just disappear, she thought, the cruel thought repeating itself with the relentlessness of a mantra. I can’t afford to let my children suffer if I ever had any. This bloodline—this fortune—this house—none of it is worth what it costs us. We are cursed. We are damned.

The image of ancestors bowed over ledgers and seals, the old stories trading in bargains and barter, floated into the edges of her mind. She imagined the long chain of women who had come before her, women who may have made choices she could not fully understand, choices made in panic and hunger and the desperate desire to keep children from starving. Those choices, tethered to wealth and legacy, had become invisible chains binding the family. The more Daisy imagined it, the heavier the chain felt.

Her chest tightened. She lay down on the bed and curled into herself as if that could make the world smaller, less sharp. Emotions moved through her like weather—lightning strikes of anger followed by gray, exhausted rain. A part of her hated the very idea of legacy, of being named in a ledger somewhere, of having her fate asserted by a paper signature gone cold. Another part of her, quieter and ashamed, wondered if the old bargains had been made in a way that deserved compassion: people in desperate times, sold for survival. The moral clarity she wanted faded under the weight of so many human choices.

Minutes passed and then hours, or at least it felt that way. Eventually, the sobbing outside the door quieted. Her mother’s steps retreated down the staircase and to the ground floor; the house settled into a low hum of clocks and the distant rush of city traffic. Daisy lay awake on the bed, staring at the swirl of light on the ceiling, trying to imagine how to move from this jagged isolation to something that resembled life.

A knock sounded at the door, soft and tentative. “Daisy?” It was Jessy’s voice, muffled and careful. “Are you there?”

Daisy wiped at her face and forced her voice as even as she could make it. “Yeah. It’s open.”

Jessy’s face appeared, framed in the doorway like a lifeline. She was pale from travel and worry but steady in her expression. She came straight in and set a paper bag on the bedside table. “I brought you something to eat,” she said, not waiting for invitation. “And coffee. God, Daisy. Don’t make me say the obvious—don’t do anything stupid. Not now, not ever.”

Daisy closed her eyes and let herself be small and human and tired. “I don’t know how to keep going,” she admitted. “I’m terrified of becoming the thing they all whisper about. I can’t bear another funeral. I can’t bear the idea of my child—if I had one—knowing this was the price of their life.”

Jessy sat on the edge of the bed and pushed the food toward her. “You don’t have to be brave for anyone else right now,” she said. “You can be brave for yourself. And you don’t have to do it alone. Not me. Not your mother.”

“You don’t understand,” Daisy said, the words tumbling out. “They told me things I didn’t take seriously as a child. I laughed them off. But if there is any truth—any thread of it—how do you even fight that? Do you call the past a liar and hope it goes away?”

“You fight it,” Jessy said, simple and fierce. “You start with the ledger. You start with the people who remember. You ask questions. You search the paperwork. And you talk to someone—a professional—about what to do with the part of you that wants to run away.”

Daisy let the plan land like a small, tentative stone on a pond. The ripples were faint, but they were movement, at least. She had felt so paralyzed—part shock, part guilt, part something darker. The idea of action, even paperwork and phone calls and small investigations, felt like an antidote to the slow poison of despair. It would not fix everything overnight; it might not even fix anything concrete at all. But it was motion, and motion meant life.

“Okay,” she said finally, voice raw but steadier. “First thing tomorrow we call the archive office. We ask my grandmother’s registrar about any legal documents. We speak to the family historian. We’ll find anything that looks like a pact or a record or something. We’ll bring it into the open.”

Jessy nodded, relief and wariness in her eyes. “And meanwhile—no decisions about dying. No more scheduling graves. We pause and breathe and get help.”

Daisy nodded. For the first time since David’s funeral, she imagined a route forward that included staying rather than leaving. It was unpolished and fragile and full of work she could not yet see through. But it was something. It was a beginning.

Outside, the sky began to pale toward dawn, and the mansion, for all its grandeur and shadow, let in a thread of light. Daisy lay back, not with resignation now but with the cautious sense that perhaps the history nested in her bones could be read and, if necessary, challenged. The curse—if curse there was—would not be the last word on her life.

She breathed in, then out. The room hummed around her—the chandelier above, the clock on the mantel, the distant city waking. In the stillness, she felt Jessy’s hand squeeze hers and her mother’s footsteps returning to the stair’s foot. She was not alone, and that, in an hour full of fury and fear, felt like something to hold.