After the security told me Jeffrey had lost it, I borrowed an old, faded white shirt from the cleaning lady and wore some makeup to look worn out.
I played it cool and clueless.
“Sophie, what are you even talking about? There’s trouble back at the orchard, and I quit my job. I don’t have thirty thousand dollars lying around!”
In the hospital, Sophie shone like a star, while I felt as plain as a middle–aged country bumpkin.
Just then, Jeffrey’s mom, Tracy, walked in confidently.
She barely gave me a look, her eyes zeroing in on Sophie. “So, you’re Jeff’s girl?”
Sophie’s face lit up like a Christmas tree.
She shot me a smug glance before turning to Tracy, saying with a syrupy voice, “I’m so sorry for your loss. If there’s anything, anything at all that you need, I’m here.”
Jeffrey straightened his collar, hiding the lines that time had etched into his skin. “Let’s go check on Juliet.”
The morgue was chilly and still. Juliet lay there, her eyes hollow, her hair as lifeless as straw.
It was surreal. She was fine just yesterday, but looking at her here, she looked like life itself
had been sucked out of her.
“The doctors are stumped,” rambled Tracy. “They can’t figure out why she just… withered away overnight when she was recovering.”
However, if she wanted the truth, Juliet was better off
She was a walking curse, a blight better left buried.
gone.
Yet there I was, putting on a show of grief, even squeezing out a couple of crocodile tears, even though I was the puppet master behind the curtain.
I had given that pearl bracelet to a beggar, whispering that it could turn back the clock to her twenty–third year, a time of health and second chances.
However, to turn a sickly, old beggar back to her prime? That kind of magic came with a price -a price that would leave Jeffrey and his family extremely miserable.
Sophie, ever the eager beaver, was already bustling around, taking care of Juliet’s last rites.
As I rounded the corner in the hallway, I caught the tail end of Jeffrey’s heated argument with his mother.
“What, you’re telling me you wished for riches? But you swore up and down you wanted to
1/2
stay young, to live it up with that handsome young thing”
