Chapter 1

After I died, my spirit didn't fade. I drifted into the living room.

Elena's face was pale, almost gray, and her lips had lost their color.

A three-tiered cake sat in the center of the dining table, frosted in pink cream, with "Happy Birthday, Little Princess" written across the top.

Mom had her arms around Elena's shoulders from behind, her chin resting on top of Elena's head. Dad sat across from them with both hands shoved into his hair, perfectly still.

"I thought I heard Emma calling out from the cellar just now." Elena's voice was so faint it almost wasn't there. "Can someone go check on her?"

Mom pulled her in tighter. "She's fine. You know how she gets. Every single birthday of yours, she pulls something. Every time."

"But what if she's really—"

"That's enough." Dad finally spoke, his voice low and controlled. "Today is your last birthday. No one is going to ruin it."

He swallowed when he said "last."

Mom buried her face in Elena's hair, and a tear slipped from the corner of her eye.

Elena didn't say anything more, but she glanced toward the cellar with worry, then quietly cut a slice of cake and set it aside for me.

Elena never took the favoritism for granted. If anything, she understood better than anyone what it meant: every good thing that landed on her was something taken from me.

So she'd been quietly trying to make it up to me.

Winter nights when Mom only brought extra blankets for Elena, she'd creep over barefoot in the dark and tuck the edge of her blanket around me, then go back and shiver under a thin sheet.

When guests came with sweets and left them all in front of her, she wouldn't eat a single one. She'd stuff them in her pockets and press the whole pile into my hands after Mom and Dad had gone to sleep.

Every time I got sent to stand in the corner, Elena would rush over and grab my arm. "I made her do it. Punish me instead."

She always said the same thing to me: "Emma, I'm sorry. If it weren't for this curse, they wouldn't treat you this way."

But Mom and Dad never saw it like that.

"She's always hated seeing you happy." Across the table, Mom was speaking softly to Elena, her voice thick with tenderness. "You took her entire curse onto yourself, and she can't even be grateful. How can you still worry about her?"

Mom's expression hardened. "Have you forgotten what happened when you turned twelve?"

I hadn't forgotten. That was the first time I really understood what Elena's curse mark actually meant.

On Elena's twelfth birthday, Dad took a rare half-day off work. Mom had been up since five in the morning making rich broth, roasting lamb, filling the table with everything Elena loved.

Dad had also brought home a delicate moonstone bracelet, forged by one of the elvish craftsmen in town. It cost him two months' wages.

He bent down and clasped it onto Elena's wrist himself while Mom stood nearby filming on her phone, face wet with tears.

I watched from the kitchen doorway.

I can't say exactly what I was thinking. I just remember I ran forward and swept the whole table clear with my arm.

Bowls shattered. Broth splashed over Mom's feet and she hissed in pain.

"It's my birthday too! Why does she get everything!"

I stood there screaming in the middle of the wreckage, like something feral and cornered.

It wasn't just jealousy, not entirely. It was because I'd suddenly seen it clearly: Dad saving two months' salary for a bracelet, Mom up before dawn cooking, both of them crying as they filmed her.

They weren't celebrating a birthday. They were counting down the days she had left.

But I was too young. The real words were jammed somewhere in my chest and I couldn't get them out. The only thing that came out was the ugliest version.

Dad's face went dark. He picked me up, threw me into my bedroom, and locked it from outside.

No one brought me food for the entire day.

In the middle of the night, the lock clicked.

Elena was crouching in the doorway holding a cold bread roll and half a cup of water. The bread was hard as a rock, and both her knees were scraped raw.

I found out later that she'd climbed on a stool to reach the key in Mom and Dad's dresser drawer, the stool tipped, and she fell straight down.

She pressed the bread into my hand, crouched beside me, and used her sleeve to wipe the dried tears from my face.

"Stop crying, okay?"

She smiled a little. Her eyes were so red it looked like they might bleed.

"When I'm gone, everything will be yours. Lamb roast whenever you want, bracelet whenever you want... okay?"

At the table, Mom was still talking.

"Emma's ungrateful. After everything Elena's done, bearing the whole curse for her, and Emma still resents us for loving Elena. She's always been that way."

I floated in the air above them, unable to argue. She wasn't entirely wrong. I was jealous.

Jealous that when Elena got sick, someone held her all night. Jealous that she could say "Mom" and get a hug. Jealous of eighteen years of being cherished, while I screamed until my throat gave out and nobody came.

I drifted toward Elena, wanting to hold her, wanting to tell her I really was sick, my stomach really did hurt, I wasn't lying. But my fingers passed right through her shoulder.

I looked down at my hand. Transparent.

I drifted through the cellar door and looked at the girl curled up in the corner. That was me.

I was already dead, and the one who had taken the full weight of the curse in the end was me.