The Ladies of the Secret Circus by Constance Sayers (the little red hen ebook TXT) 📕

then, until she finally moved back to Los Angeles permanently, to pursue her photography career.

Sadly, that wasn’t the only story Ben and Lara were forced to manufacture. They’d also had to fabricate for Audrey a sudden trip to Spain about a horse. After a month, when Jason and Gaston hadn’t heard from her, Ben began pressing Lara to do what they both knew was necessary. As much as Lara couldn’t face it, Audrey wasn’t coming back. So at Ben’s prodding, they created a fake car accident, with Lara using an enchanted document as proof to both Gaston and Jason that her mother was dead.

At the memorial service for Audrey, she and Jason sat on the bench in the old Kerrigan Falls Cemetery. “You should know where he is buried, too.” Then Jason took her hand and walked her around the back to Peter Norton Beaumont’s grave. It was the only indication he’d ever given her that he’d known the truth all along. That—and he gave her Peter’s Fender Sunburst. As they gazed down at the granite stone, Lara longed to tell him that his friend, Peter Beaumont, was interred at Cabot Farms, but she felt a need to protect him. He’d had enough.

Gaston Boucher had also become a dear friend. She could see the hope that he’d had for a different life for himself with Audrey. She and Ben stayed close to him, inviting him to dinners at Cabot Farms, an empty place at the table for Audrey.

Lara sold her own house and moved back into Cabot Farms with Ben, and they settled down into a quiet existence—if raising hellhounds could be considered a quiet existence, although Lara found them quite lazy and content to sit by the fire.

After all that had happened, how did a person just return to a normal life? Now that she knew that daemon blood flowed through her, what could normal possible look like? So Lara found herself moving through her day like the walking dead. That first summer was the hardest. She sat out in the field waiting for him. Only he could fix this. Squinting in the sun, she willed him to come. Had she been nothing but a vessel for Cecile? When he failed to show, she thought she had her answer.

Yet she refused to accept things the way they were, and so she kept practicing: starting cars, locking doors, opening drawers, dimming streetlamps, cuing records, until the magic had become as reliable as breathing. While her mother had turned her back on spells, Lara found that she didn’t feel the same. It was as much a part of her as her blond hair. She’d felt the magic there flowing through her veins as she leapt from the trapeze. Nothing in her life had felt that freeing. As she struggled to tell Ben, she found that words didn’t describe the Grand Promenade, the carousel. True, it was Hell, but it was breathtaking and strange. And wasn’t she carved from it?

Everything that Ben thought he knew had been challenged as well. They both moved around each other for a year, like soldiers who’d returned from battle. From the way he hesitated, she knew that Ben was worried about the spaces left by Todd, Marla, and Audrey, even Peter Beaumont, for she’d finally told him about Peter as well. They were two people formed by absences of others. While he never said it, she thought he worried that those who’d remained, including him, were not enough for her. At times, he wasn’t wrong. She was like the mountain that had been formed by the glacier. After it tore through, valleys remained carved like scars. Yet there had been beautiful parts to the story, too. They were in this thing together now, she and Ben, their roots so deep. Early on, there were moments when she was sure the weight of everything would topple them, and yet it hadn’t. He had been a gift through this all, but you didn’t get one without the other. And she’d decided that she was the end of this line. There would be no children for her. While Ben had assured her he understood, she worried that it was a decision he would regret, but then again, he’d been married to a one-hundred-year-old half-daemon, so normal had changed for him as well. She recalled Cecile’s words: It was luck that we are even here. Every day of happiness that we have was more than we were designed for.

Had Todd shown up that day two years ago, she would have been a different person. She thought back to her naive, silly self, standing before a mirror, enchanting a wedding dress. She’d been oblivious to everything—her family and its magic. Her mother had not done either of them a favor by hiding from it in a desire to make them ordinary. Audrey had clung too tightly to the idea of a mortal life, but Lara wasn’t sure that she’d asked for that. She’d pursued the answers that Audrey hadn’t wanted to know, but they weren’t worth her mother’s ultimate sacrifice. And oh, how she had missed her mother. More than Todd, the loss of her mother threatened to topple her.

Grief must have been contagious, because she received an email from Barrow that morning.

Lara:

I hope you are well, my friend. Yesterday afternoon, I visited the Musée d’Orsay. They’ve moved our two paintings to the second floor, overlooking the sculptures. I will always be grateful to you for displaying Sylvie on the Steed as part of the special exhibition and for your generous donation to the museum after the Sotheby’s sale.

Sometimes during lunch, I sit with our paintings. I know that they hang on the wall due, in large part, to our conviction and the sacrifices we both made.

I confess that I am forced to recall why I was first drawn to the mystery of Jacques Mourier and Émile Giroux and this wild tale of a circus fantastique. You had asked