For fifty years Margaret Thistle held this town together. Nobody ever asked her why she was like this.
She went to nine doors. Cassie's first, with a casserole and a diagnosis, and then Diane's and Valentina's and Gemma's and Ellie's and Kit's and Claire's and Dana's and Joey's. She taught nine women how to live with magic. She never told any of them how she learned.
There is a photograph in her kitchen drawer. A man she used to know, standing beside a woman named Helen, clipped from the Asheville library newsletter by a sister who never needed a note to make a point. There is a shoebox in her attic full of letters she told Cassie she burned. She did not burn them. She carried them through three cities and fifty years and she never threw a single one away.
Asheville. Spring of 1968. Margaret is twenty-two and pours coffee at a diner on Patton Avenue, and a man walks in and folds his coat on the stool beside him and orders apple pie without looking at the menu and tips thirty-five cents on a ten-cent cup. His name is Paul. He keeps coming back. He brings her a peach.
Margaret falls in love with him the way she falls into everything, completely and without looking first.
Then things start going her way. Then they keep going her way, over and over, the way weather never does, and it takes Margaret most of a year to understand that she is the reason. By then she already did the thing she will spend the next fifty years not talking about.
That was fifty years ago. This is Sunday. The casserole is made and the coven is at her table and Margaret is going to tell them all of it, from the diner to the leaving, and she is not going to soften one word of it.
Nine women are about to find out what their mentor is.
Please read this one last.
Mind Your Own Magic is the tenth and final book of Hot Flashes & Hexes, and it is the only one that does not stand alone. The other nine are cozy witch romcoms with a happily-ever-after you can count on. This one is not a romcom and it is not a romance. There is no wedding at the end. It is Margaret's confession, told out loud at her own kitchen table to the nine women she trained, and every page of it depends on you already knowing them and already loving her. Read the series in order and finish here. If Fairhaven is new to you, start with Don't Hex the Handyman and come back when you are ready.
For readers who stayed for all ten:
She went to nine doors. Cassie's first, with a casserole and a diagnosis, and then Diane's and Valentina's and Gemma's and Ellie's and Kit's and Claire's and Dana's and Joey's. She taught nine women how to live with magic. She never told any of them how she learned.
There is a photograph in her kitchen drawer. A man she used to know, standing beside a woman named Helen, clipped from the Asheville library newsletter by a sister who never needed a note to make a point. There is a shoebox in her attic full of letters she told Cassie she burned. She did not burn them. She carried them through three cities and fifty years and she never threw a single one away.
Asheville. Spring of 1968. Margaret is twenty-two and pours coffee at a diner on Patton Avenue, and a man walks in and folds his coat on the stool beside him and orders apple pie without looking at the menu and tips thirty-five cents on a ten-cent cup. His name is Paul. He keeps coming back. He brings her a peach.
Margaret falls in love with him the way she falls into everything, completely and without looking first.
Then things start going her way. Then they keep going her way, over and over, the way weather never does, and it takes Margaret most of a year to understand that she is the reason. By then she already did the thing she will spend the next fifty years not talking about.
That was fifty years ago. This is Sunday. The casserole is made and the coven is at her table and Margaret is going to tell them all of it, from the diner to the leaving, and she is not going to soften one word of it.
Nine women are about to find out what their mentor is.
Please read this one last.
Mind Your Own Magic is the tenth and final book of Hot Flashes & Hexes, and it is the only one that does not stand alone. The other nine are cozy witch romcoms with a happily-ever-after you can count on. This one is not a romcom and it is not a romance. There is no wedding at the end. It is Margaret's confession, told out loud at her own kitchen table to the nine women she trained, and every page of it depends on you already knowing them and already loving her. Read the series in order and finish here. If Fairhaven is new to you, start with Don't Hex the Handyman and come back when you are ready.
For readers who stayed for all ten:
- The mentor origin story ten books in the making
A love story that does not get fixed
A sister who keeps finding her no matter how far she runs
A shoebox of letters heavier than the suitcase that carried them
A cat with opinions and a kitchen table that holds all day
The answer to the question nobody in Fairhaven ever thought to ask
This is the end. Bring tissues.
Genre: Paranormal Romance
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