We are the Magick – we are. The truest magick in this world is in us... It is in our movements and in what we say and feel.

I sought the sea. There was a small comfort in it – in how it never ended, how there were other lands beyond it that I would never see. I tried to see the realm, like that. Like the dead people had only gone elsewhere, to a place I could not see – a place just over the sides of the earth, which is as real as the beach that I sat on.

What creatures we are. What powers are in us – in all of us. What we already know, if we choose to spend time with ourselves. What a deep love we can feel.

Carefully, she stands. And she runs her hand across the top of Thomasina’s gravestone as she leaves, like how, as girls, they would let go of hands – gradually, moving their fingertips over each other’s palms, as gently as raindrops. She has done this for sixty-eight years and there is a dip on the stone from this. She has worn the stone down with her loving goodbyes.

And just as this illness changed his life, and hers, and Claudette’s and their house on rue de l’Agneau, so it changed that old, cracked globe. It felt different in her hands – smaller. She’d hold it like an egg that could break under her touch. Because now Jeanne’s mind could not be on future of foreign countries, it had to be on the cutting up of food, the emptying of chamber pots. Her life moved around her father, and loving him more closely – and how could she resent this?

Oh there is always sadness. Always grief. I have heard folks say this life could be all hardship and sorrow, if we let it be. If we let our hearts seal over.

She never choose anything except her husband, her motherhood and her trust in God. The rest of it was put upon her and she bears it and does her best.

You’re the one who taught me that there is truth below the surface of tales. That we can learn courage from them. That they can teach us how to live our lives.

There is not one wide happiness that reaches us all at the same time.

Isn’t it the rarest thing? Never mind the whale migrations, or total eclipses of suns and moons: love that lasts, and is returned in equal measure, is the rarest thing she knows of.