A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

have a couple of kids who eat dirt.’” I stopped, confused, because those weren’t my words at all, but his. And when I looked up from the paper, he was walking toward me. We weren’t teenagers anymore. We were older, middle-aged, maybe. He took my face in his hands and drew me to him, but his hair smelled like Margot’s, and when I woke up, she was sitting on my bed.

“Jillian,” she said.

“Jesus!” I flinched, then rubbed my eyes. “Can you knock from now on?”

“I need to talk to you. I was hoping it wouldn’t have to be so soon, but . . . well.” She sat very still, almost a statue in the darkness. I reached over and flipped on a light, registering the time.

“I’m generally not a great conversationalist at four a.m.”

She sprawled on her stomach, her face in her hands, and gazed up at me, dark circles under her eyes. She was still wearing the same long dress she’d had on earlier in the day. She needed a shower. “It was fun when we did the bigger magic, wasn’t it? Just more . . . fulfilling.”

“Nope,” I said, pulling the pillow over my face. “No way. I’m staying out of this.”

She pulled the pillow gently off my face. “I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”

“Look,” I said, and sat up, a bad taste in my mouth both literally and figuratively. “I’m mad about Vy too. But maybe we have to let this blow over and then try to reason with Caroline to let her back in.”

“It’s not going to blow over.”

“I think Caroline has already realized she went too far—”

“I don’t want it to blow over.” At the wary look on my face, she scooted closer to me. “We were on the right track to achieving our goal, to electing the first female president. But then we messed up—I messed up, I can admit it. And because of that, Caroline has decided that we can only do selfish little magic instead. But you look at everything going on in the world and . . . I can’t just sit back anymore.”

“Margot,” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but the kind of magic you’re talking about . . . that feels like a whole different scale, and maybe it’s not worth it to blow everything up because—”

“Because you don’t think it’s possible,” she said. When I didn’t respond, she reached into the pocket of her dress and carefully pulled out a black-and-white picture. She placed it on the bed between us like it was a sacred object. “My great-grandmother gave me this. She was still alive when I was young,” Margot said. I leaned forward to look at the photograph. “I showed it to Caroline once, and she glanced at it for a minute and then moved on to other things. But I studied every detail.”

The picture showed three women, rich women, dressed in evening gowns—all satin and puffed sleeves and furs. It must have been the 1930s, but these women had clearly escaped the austerity of the Depression. The one in the middle sat in a leather armchair. The women on either side of her placed their hands on her shoulder. They all looked at the camera with frank, proud gazes.

“It’s the original coven,” I said, and Margot nodded.

She pointed to the woman on the right, who had catlike eyes and Margot’s straight, elegant nose. “My great-grandmother. She’d tell me the history, when I went to visit her in her nursing home. How they began to meet in secret to protect their families and their fortunes and themselves. When they worked together, they were free. Powerful. So much more powerful than women were supposed to be.”

Their faces showed it—power in the tilt of their chins. The one in the middle held a cigarette between her lips and smirked at the camera. “They used to do undeniable magic,” Margot went on. “She told me that once, they actually flew. Just lifted off the ground and soared, landing on the spire of the Chrysler Building.” She paused and looked at me. “I know, you’re thinking that was probably the dementia talking.”

“Or they were doing some very powerful flapper drugs.”

“I don’t think so. I swear it was the most lucid I’d ever seen her. It was like the Coven was the one thing she could remember in vivid detail.”

We both looked down at the picture again. The woman on the left had Caroline’s thin lips and pale coloring, her hair in a platinum bob.

“What happened to the third member?” I asked.

“She left the city. Afterward, they added more people to the circle, and they had influence, sure, but they never got back to the same level of magic after she was gone.”

“No more night flying?”

“Jillian,” Margot said, her voice urgent. “Listen. I forgot about all this as I grew up. But one day when things were really bad with Gus, I was in the bathroom, staring at a bunch of pills, thinking that maybe I should just take the easy way out. But then I remembered there was another option. I could do what my great-grandmother did, build something where I could fly.” Her eyes were shining now. “Shortly after that, Caroline and I saw each other again for the first time in a long while. She told me her plans for Nevertheless, and that night, I left Gus.”

“So it sounds like your relationship with Caroline has meant a lot to you,” I said, even as I wondered—was I trying to keep everything simple (or rather, as simple as it could be in this batshit situation) for the sake of an article, or because I had so recently begun to feel a kind of belonging in this circle, and I didn’t want to watch it rip itself apart?

“It has,” Margot said, her voice small and sad. She straightened her shoulders. “But now Caroline’s trying to control everything too, like Gus did, and it’s making all of us small. I think I can change her mind, but I need you