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of me, wasn’t it?”
    He reached for his sunglasses from the visor clip and slipped them on. “What gives you that idea?”
    It totally was. My heart sank. My stomach joined it.
    He glanced over at me. “Oh, don’t look like that, Maggie. Look, it’s no big deal. I’ll start taking classes next semester. Like I said, I already looked into a deferral, and I think it’s the way to g—”
    “Classes? Marcus, no! You can’t be thinking of putting that off. You’ve been planning this for months!” Marcus had been planning to return to college with an eye toward completing a teaching degree, an idea Lou had suggested originally but that Marcus had latched on to with an enthusiasm that made it seem especially meant to be. How on earth had I managed to forget about that? Why hadn’t it occurred to me to ask? Was I so wrapped up in my own egocentric world that I couldn’t see beyond my personal problems? Please tell me I hadn’t gotten that narcissistic.
    “It’s no big deal—”
    “No big deal? Of course it’s a big deal. It’s important to you.” I couldn’t be the reason he put off going back for his degree. I just couldn’t. Miserable, I wracked my brain. I had to think of a way to make him see reason. “You have to go. If you don’t, I won’t be able to live with myself.”
    “Maggie—”
    “I’m serious. Because what if something happens before the winter semester starts? Would you put it off then, too? People who put things off are just asking for something to happen, Marcus. And the universe is tricky that way. And if you didn’t go back, it would be all my fault.” I was on a roll. I barely noticed when he pulled the truck over to the curb and let it idle in neutral while he turned toward me.
    “You’re being unreasonable.”
    “No, I’m not. I’m telling you I don’t want that guilt to be on my head, hovering over me, waiting for something to go wrong.”
    He sat there with his brows furrowed and a small, bemused smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You’re kind of a glass-half-empty person, aren’t you. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
    I couldn’t exactly disagree with him, at least not about that, so I didn’t say anything.
    “Well, you don’t have to be.” He reached out and tugged at my fingers. “Nothing is going to happen.” When I opened my mouth to disagree, he shook his head. “Nothing. Look, the world isn’t a perfect place. Things happen—”
    Yeah. Life. And worse.
    “—but I prefer to think of them as challenges, not road-blocks. Just things that need to be worked around. That’s what our Guides are for. Ask and you shall receive. There is a way. A solution will come. You just have to be patient, have faith. Trust your Guides.”
    I would have said more, but something wasn’t letting me. It might have been the voice of Grandma C quavering in my ear in a surprisingly authoritative tone. Considering the fact that she is, you know, dead. Deceased. No longer of this earthly domain. Moved on to bigger and better time zones in the sky.
    You gotta trust somebody sometime, Margaret Mary-Catherine O’Neill. And since you won’t put your trust in God or his host of saints and angels, you might as well put your trust in me. You know I would never steer you wrong.
    In my ear. Damn and double damn. I wished the voice would go back to being thought based. Somehow when it was within my head, it was a whole lot easier to imagine that it was probably just the voice of my conscience manifesting with my grandmother’s voice. Now I wasn’t so sure it was just my imagination. But if not that, what was it?
    “All right,” I relented, trying for a smile. “I’ll try.”
    “That’s my girl.”
     
     
    Trying. What exactly did that mean?
    I pondered that for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon while I puttered and clunked about at Enchantments. For a chronic worrier-slash-thinker-slash-overanalyzer like me, trying is exactly what trying