Rosa’s Voodoo Repository
by Lin Dale

PART ONE – ROSA’S STORY
(The final part, Part Two, is written and will follow shortly)

Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Cupcakes (and One Questionable Decision)

My name is Rosa, and my life is a monument to other people’s poor life choices. Tucked between a kebab shop that smells of regret and a laundrette that specialises in existential despair, my little emporium, ‘Rosa’s Voodoo Repository’, offers solutions. Not all of them conventional, and most of them, according to my GP, Dr. Chandrasekhar, ‘medically inexplicable but delightfully coincidental.’

I sell charms for prosperity (a little bag of herbs and a sharply worded petition to Papa Legba), curses for petty revenge (a doll and some very specific, very creative stitching), and remedies for everything from warts to a wilting libido. The love spells are my bread and butter, though my Nana always said they were like supermarket cake: sweet, satisfying, and not built to last. The heart, she’d cackle, waving a gnarled finger, is a fickle tenant in the house of the body. It’ll pack its bags and leave for a nicer view quicker than you can say ‘side chick’.

I am, by the unshakeable traditions of my Haitian forebears, a voodoo priestess. The mantle was passed from my grandmother, a woman who could silence a room with a glance and make a man’s hair fall out with a well-placed herb, to my mother, a brilliant NHS nurse who saw her magic as just another form of medicine, and then to me. I’m the one who stayed in the shop, who kept the flames on the altar burning. I’m also, as my mother would say with a sigh, ‘blessed with a generous spirit and an even more generous arse.’

Voluptuous, the men call it. A nice, soft, classical word that makes my proportions sound like a Rubens painting and not the result of a profound and enduring love affair with cheese and Guinness. My most… prominent features are what my friend Chloe diplomatically calls my ‘questionable assets’ – a pair of breasts so formidable they have their own postcode. They’re magnificent, I’ll admit. They’re also a fantastic man-filter. They attract a certain kind of gaze, a specific breed of man who sees them as a destination, not part of the journey. They want to visit the tourist attraction, take a few snaps for their mental spank bank, and then catch the next train back to a woman with a more manageable chest and, presumably, a more conventional career.

Enter Ben. Ben of the floppy blond hair, the trust fund smile, and the architectural firm he definitely didn’t build from the ground up. He moved into the loft conversion three doors down six months ago, bringing with him a scent of expensive aftershave and unearned confidence. He first wandered into my shop looking for a ‘quirky’ gift for his mother. His eyes did the familiar two-step: first, a startled appreciation of my shop’s ambience (dim lighting, dried herbs, the faint, comforting smell of cinnamon and earth), then a slow, descending pilgrimage south to settle on the twin peaks of Mount Rosa.

We chatted. He was charming in a way that made my cynicism feel tired. I, against my better judgement and the whispered warnings of my ancestors, felt a flutter. A stupid, schoolgirl flutter. So, I did what any self-respecting, powerful voodoo priestess would do. I acted like a complete plank.

I cast a love spell on him. A good one, too. Not the cheap, ‘like-me’ stuff. This was a full-fat, proper number with red candles, lodestone dust, and a lock of his hair I’d snagged from his jacket when he ‘accidentally’ brushed past me in the street. For a glorious fortnight, it worked. He asked me out. We went for drinks. He laughed at my jokes. He seemed genuinely interested in my work, calling it ‘fascinatingly esoteric’. He even managed to hold eye contact for impressively long stretches.

Then, the spell fizzled. They always do. Permanence in love isn’t something you can stitch together with magic thread; it has to be built, brick by boring brick. He met a yoga instructor named Annabel who had the upper body strength of a sparrow and a chest as flat as her personality. Just like that, I was back to being the ‘cool, quirky neighbour’ he’d wave at while hauling his recycling out.

It stung. More than it should have. I’m thirty years old, for heaven’s sake. I should know better.

Which is how I found myself, on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon, elbow-deep in my grandmother’s grimoire. It wasn’t her everyday book; this was the Big One. The one bound in what I strongly suspect is human skin (a story for another, much darker day), filled with spells written in a spidery Kreyòl that made my head ache. And there it was. Tucked between a ritual for summoning a storm and a charm to make your enemy’s teeth fall out, was the Exchange des Âmes. The Swap of Souls.

The instructions were deceptively simple. A personal item from the target, a potion made from seven bitter herbs, a silver bowl of water, and a focus of ‘profound intent’. The caster and the target had to be within a ‘stone’s throw’. And the kicker? It was temporary. Twenty-four hours. A cosmic timeout for two souls to walk a mile in each other’s… well, everything.

It was madness. The kind of deep, resonant, ‘you-will-probably-regret-this-forever’ madness that my grandmother would have whacked me with a wooden spoon for even considering. But as I sat there, watching Ben through my rain-streaked window as he helped Annabel into a taxi, her lithe little body folded like a origami swan, a petty, delicious, and utterly reckless idea bloomed in my mind.

What if I could make him see? Not through a love spell, but through experience. What if Ben, for just one day, had to navigate the world in this body? In my body. With the weight of it, the gaze it attracted, the sheer, unignorable physicality of it? It wasn’t about revenge. It was about… education. A crash course in empathy, delivered via the school of hard knocks and a 38GG bra.

It was the worst idea I’d ever had. I was absolutely going to do it.

Chapter 2: The Bitter Brew

Acquiring Ben’s personal item was laughably easy. The man was fastidious about his recycling. Every Wednesday night, a neatly sorted box of bottles and cans appeared outside his door. And nestled amongst the Peroni bottles was a treasure trove of DNA. I simply waited until the cover of darkness (which, in London, is just a slightly darker shade of grey), and, clad in my best ‘sneaking-about’ hoodie, plucked an empty, high-end moisturiser jar from his box. The label promised ‘age-defying hydration’. Perfect.

The herbs were trickier. My shop is well-stocked, but this recipe called for some serious niche ingredients. Wormwood, of course. Mugwort. Angelica root. A few others that made my tongue curl just smelling them. I ground them into a fine, vile-smelling powder in my mortar and pestle, chanting the words my grandmother had written. The air in my flat above the shop grew thick and heavy, the way it does before a thunderstorm. My cat, Baron Samedi (Barry for short), gave me a look of profound disapproval from the top of the fridge.

The final step was the focus of ‘profound intent’. The book was vague. ‘That which you seek to understand must be held in the mind’s eye,’ it said, unhelpfully. I thought about Ben. Not Ben the object of my misguided affection, but Ben the phenomenon. Ben, who glided through life on a cloud of privilege and good bone structure. Ben, who had never, I would bet my last jar of chicken-foot powder, had to heave a sigh of resignation before entering a lingerie shop.

I filled my grandmother’s silver bowl with water and placed Ben’s moisturiser jar beside it. I sprinkled the powdered herbs onto the water’s surface, where they floated for a moment before dissolving into a murky, greenish film. Then, I closed my eyes and focused. I didn’t think of love, or revenge. I thought of understanding. I thought of the weight of my breasts, the chafe of my thighs, the way men’s eyes scanned me like barcodes. I thought of the constant, low-level negotiation my body required just to exist in public space. I poured all of that feeling, that specific, weary knowledge, into the bowl.

I spoke the words. They were old, guttural, tasting of salt and iron on my tongue. The air crackled. Barry yowled and shot under the sofa. For a second, nothing happened. Then, a wave of dizziness hit me so hard I stumbled back from the table. The room swam, the colours bleeding into one another like a wet painting. There was a sensation of being pulled, of my very essence being siphoned out through a straw, and then… nothing.

A profound, silent, black nothing.

I came to with a jolt. The first thing I noticed was the ceiling. It was wrong. My ceiling has a distinctive water stain in the shape of Tasmania. This one was pristine, artexed, and fitted with a depressingly modern LED downlight.

The second thing I noticed was the smell. It was clean. Alarmingly so. The scent of lemon-scented polish and that particular brand of masculine shower gel that promises ‘arctic blast’ or ‘titanium endurance’. It was utterly devoid of the comforting smells of my home: cinnamon, dried herbs, and the faint, musky scent of magic.

The third thing I noticed was my body. Or rather, the body I was in.

I sat up. Or, I tried to. The movement was different. Lighter. I swung my legs—long, pale, surprisingly hairy legs—over the side of a ridiculously low platform bed. I was in a room that screamed ‘bachelor pad curated by an interior designer with a beige fetish’. Grey walls, a single, large abstract painting, a charcoal-coloured duvet.

I looked down.

There they were. Or, rather, there they weren’t.

My magnificent bosom was gone. In its place was a flat, smooth, and frankly, unremarkable chest, dusted with blond hair. I was wearing a pair of expensive-looking navy blue pyjama bottoms. I patted my chest. It was firm. Bony. Alien.

I scrambled off the bed, my movements awkward and gangly, and stumbled towards a full-length mirror leaning against the wall. The reflection that stared back was Ben’s.

I, Rosa, was looking out of Ben’s eyes.

His face was a mask of my own shock. The floppy hair was tousled from sleep. The blue eyes were wide with a terror that was entirely mine. I poked his cheek. He poked back. I stuck out his tongue. He reciprocated.

“Oh, sweet Legba,” I whispered. The voice that came out was Ben’s. A pleasant, public-school baritone. It was utterly bizarre.

The spell had worked. I was in. I was Ben.

A giddy, hysterical laugh bubbled up in Ben’s throat and escaped his mouth. This was simultaneously the most terrifying and thrilling thing that had ever happened to me. Then, a cold dread trickled down my spine. If I was here, in Ben’s body… where was Ben?

Chapter 3: The Awkward Truths of a New Shell

The first hour was a masterclass in disorientation. Ben’s body was a foreign country, and I didn’t speak the language. Everything was too high, too light, too… angular. I kept misjudging doorways, expecting my hips to be wider. I walked into the bathroom and flinched at the stranger in the mirror for a solid ten seconds before remembering it was me. Or him. Us.

I needed to see. I needed to know what had happened on my end. With a sense of profound trespassing, I went through Ben’s flat. It was as characterless as a hotel room. A state-of-the-art coffee machine, a fridge containing bottled water, protein shakes, and a sad-looking tub of hummus. No books, unless you counted a stack of architectural digests. His laptop was password-protected (‘Annabel1’ – I sighed). This was the life that seemed so effortlessly perfect from the outside? It was sterile.

My mission, however, was clear. I had to get to my shop. I had to see what, or who, was in my body.

Getting dressed was an ordeal. Ben’s wardrobe was a symphony of beige, grey, and navy. I picked out a pair of chinos and a simple white t-shirt. Putting them on felt like wearing a costume. The lack of a bra was a novel sensation – a feeling of unanchored freedom, coupled with a vague vulnerability. I found his keys and wallet on a minimalist shelf by the door. Slipping his phone into my pocket (my pocket! The novelty!), I took a deep breath and ventured out into the world as Ben.

The first thing that struck me was the space. People moved out of my way. A woman coming out of the newsagent’s gave me a quick, shy smile before looking away. I was used to smiles from men, often laden with expectation, or from women, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes assessing. This was different. It was… deferential. I was taking up space without even trying.

I walked the short distance to my shop, my heart (Ben’s heart) hammering against his ribs. The blinds were still down. My body, I hoped, was still asleep upstairs. I had a key, of course, but I couldn’t just waltz in. I needed a pretext.

I decided to be a customer. A terribly early, terribly eager customer. I knocked on the shop door, trying to look like a man who had a sudden, urgent need for a voodoo charm.

After a long moment, the door was unlocked and opened a crack. And there I was.

Or, rather, there was my body. My beautiful, familiar, curvy body, peering out with a look of pure, unadulterated panic. My own face, but the expression was all wrong. The eyes, usually warm and knowing, were wide with a rabbit-in-headlights fear. My hair, which I normally styled into a glorious, fluffy afro, was squashed flat on one side.

“Yeah?” the person in my body said. The voice was mine, but the tone was hesitant, reedy. Ben’s tone.

“Erm… good morning,” I said, in Ben’s voice, feeling like I was in a particularly surreal play. “Are you… open?”

“Open? It’s… it’s half-seven,” Not-Rosa said, clutching my favourite silk kimono robe tightly around my body. “What do you want?”

“A… charm?” I ventured. “For… luck?”

Not-Rosa—Ben—stared at me. I could see the cogs whirring behind my own eyes. He was terrified, confused, and clearly had no idea who I was or what was happening. A wave of pity washed over me. This had been a colossally bad idea.

“Look, mate, I’ve just… I’ve had a really weird night,” he said, using my voice. “I think I’m… unwell. Come back later.”

And with that, he shut the door in my face. I heard the lock click firmly into place.

Right. So, Ben was in my body, he was freaking out, and he had barricaded himself in my home. This was going swimmingly.

Chapter 4: The Weight of the World

I spent the next few hours in a state of surreal limbo. I went to the local café, where the barista, a girl named Sasha who always gave me a free biscuit with my tea, gave Ben a bright, flirty smile and called me ‘darling’. I ordered my usual – a strong English breakfast tea – and she said, “No coffee, love? You look like a flat white kind of guy.” I was being typecast in my own life.

Sitting at a table by the window, I became acutely aware of my new physical presence. My limbs felt long and unwieldy. I kept knocking my knees against the table. The simple act of drinking tea felt different; the cup was smaller in this hand, the sipping motion less delicate. And the silence… it was a different kind of silence. As a woman, particularly a woman of my size, my silence in public is often seen as an invitation. Men feel the need to fill it. As Ben, my silence was contemplative. Respectable. No one bothered me.

My phone—Ben’s phone—buzzed. A text from Annabel. ‘Hey you! Missed you last night. Fancy a run before work? Xx’

A run. The very idea made my soul, if not Ben’s legs, ache. I typed back, my fingers clumsy on the screen. ‘Not feeling great. Stomach bug. Rain check?’ I added a sick-faced emoji for good measure.

Her reply was instant. ‘Aww, poor baby! Do you need me to bring you anything? Soup? Lucozade?’

I stared at the message. This was the kind of effortless care I’d craved from Ben. And here it was, being offered to me, while I was pretending to be him. The irony was so thick you could spread it on toast.

‘All good, thanks. Just need to rest.’ I sent, feeling like a fraud.

‘OK! Feel better, my love! Xx’

My love. The words stung. This was his life. Easy affection, easy concern, a girlfriend who wanted to go for a run at the crack of dawn. And what was I doing? I was haunting my own shop like a spectral estate agent.

I decided to try again. I needed to talk to him. To explain, somehow, without sounding like I’d escaped from a secure facility.

I walked back to ‘Rosa’s Voodoo Repository’. The blinds were still down, but the door was unlocked. Pushing it open, the familiar scent of my home washed over me, a comforting blanket after the sterile air of Ben’s flat. The shop was in disarray. Jars of herbs had been knocked over, scattering dried leaves and roots across the counter. My grimoire was open on the floor. And sitting on my favourite armchair, head in his—my—hands, was Ben-in-Me.

He looked up as I entered. My face was pale beneath its rich complexion, my eyes red-raw.

“You,” he whispered, my voice trembling. “What did you do to me? What is this? Some kind of… of roofie? A hallucination?”

“It’s not a hallucination, Ben,” I said gently, closing the door behind me. “My name is Rosa. This is my shop. And, well… we’ve had a bit of a swap.”

He stared at me, his—my—mouth agape. “A swap? What the hell are you talking about? This is insane! I woke up… like this!” He gestured wildly at my body. “I look in the mirror and I see… you! And these… these things!” He gestured with even more distress at my chest. “They’re… they’re massive! I nearly gave myself a black eye turning over in bed!”

I had to bite the inside of Ben’s cheek to stop from laughing. The indignity of it all was suddenly, terribly funny.

“It’s a spell,” I explained, moving carefully closer, as one would approach a spooked horse. “A body-swap spell. It’s temporary. Twenty-four hours.”

“A spell?” he repeated, his voice rising in pitch. “You’re that voodoo woman! The one with the… the weird shop! You did this? Why? Because I stopped calling you?”

There it was. The reduction of my complex, powerful tradition to a spurned woman’s witchcraft. The familiar heat of irritation flared in me, but it felt different in Ben’s cooler body.

“No, Ben,” I said, my voice calm. “It’s not about that. It’s about… perspective.”

“Perspective?” he almost shrieked. “I have a perspective! I have a meeting with a client in two hours! How am I supposed to do that… like this?” He stood up, and it was bizarre to see my own body move with such frantic, masculine energy. He started pacing, my silk robe flapping. “And my back hurts. Why does my back hurt so much?”

“That’s the weight of the ‘things’,” I said dryly. “It’s called gravity. You get used to it. Mostly.”

He stopped pacing and glared at me with my own eyes. “Fix it. Now.”

“I can’t. The spell has a twenty-four-hour duration. We just have to… ride it out.”

The look of sheer, unadulterated horror on my face was something I’ll never forget. It was the look of a man whose entire understanding of the universe had just been inverted, and who was deeply unhappy about the new wallpaper.

“Ride it out?” he whispered, sinking back into the chair. “How? What am I supposed to do?”

“Well,” I said, a plan forming in my mind. “For starters, you’re going to have to run the shop.”

Chapter 5: A Day in the Life

What followed was the most bizarre day of my life, and I once had to perform a cleansing ritual on a man who was convinced his parrot was possessed by his mother-in-law.

I gave Ben a crash course in being me. It was like teaching a goldfish to play the piano. I showed him the till, explained the basic properties of the most common herbs (“No, that’s not for tea, it’s for hex-breaking, you’ll give someone the runs for a week”), and tried to impart the general vibe of the place. It was supposed to be mysterious and comforting, not, as he was making it, look like a hostage situation.

Our first customer was Mrs. Higgins, an elderly Irish woman who came in every week for a ‘peace-keeping’ sachet for her warring cats.

“Morning, Rosa, love,” she chirped, then stopped, peering at Ben-in-Me. “You alright, dear? You look a bit peaky.”

Ben-in-Me stared at her, frozen.

“She’s fine, Mrs. Higgins,” I said, in Ben’s voice, stepping forward. “Just a bit of a cold. I’m… helping out today.”

Mrs. Higgins looked from me to Ben-in-Me and back again, her eyes twinkling. “Helping out, are you? Well, isn’t that nice of you, Ben. Always said you were a good lad.” She winked at me. “The usual, please.”

Ben-in-Me stood rigid behind the counter. I nudged him. “The yellow bag, with the catnip and lavender,” I whispered.

He fumbled with the jars, his hands—my hands—shaking. He eventually managed to scoop some herbs into a little muslin bag, spilling about half of it on the counter.

“That’ll be five pounds,” he mumbled, not making eye contact.

Mrs. Higgins paid, still looking amused. “You two take care now.” As she left, I heard her mutter, “Young people. Probably been at the wacky baccy.”

The morning continued in this vein. Ben-in-Me was a disaster. He mislabelled a jar of Goofer’s Dust as ‘All-Purpose Seasoning’. He nearly gave a love-drawing charm to a woman who was clearly seeking a curse for her cheating husband. He jumped every time the doorbell chimed. He was learning, in the most brutal way possible, that running my shop wasn’t just about selling weird stuff; it was about reading people, offering comfort, and holding space for their hopes and fears. It was emotional labour, and he was terrible at it.

Meanwhile, I was discovering the strange privileges of being Ben. When I popped out to get us some lunch from the bakery, the guy behind the counter called me ‘boss’. A woman holding a baby smiled at me and moved her pram aside without me having to ask. I walked down the street, and the world was a smooth, obstacle-free path. It was… effortless. And deeply unsettling.

The climax came when Annabel showed up.

She bounced into the shop, all Lycra and radiant health, her smile faltering only slightly when she saw me—Ben—behind the counter.

“Ben! What are you doing here?” she asked, then her eyes landed on Ben-in-Me, who had turned the colour of week-old porridge. “And… Rosa? Are you okay? You look terrible.”

“I’m… I’m ill,” Ben-in-Me squeaked, clutching at the counter for support.

Annabel’s gaze swung back to me, a tiny, suspicious frown creasing her perfect brow. “You said you were sick in bed. Why are you here? With… her?”

The air thickened. I could see the gears turning in her head. Her boyfriend, who claimed to have a stomach bug, is found cooped up in the shop of the ‘voluptuous voodoo woman’ he briefly dated, who looks like death warmed up. It was a soap opera plot waiting to happen.

“I… brought her some soup,” I said lamely, gesturing to the bakery bag. “Neighbourly duty.”

“Right,” Annabel said, her voice cold. She looked at Ben-in-Me, at the state of my dishevelled hair and panicked expression, and then back at me. “Well. I can see you’re… busy. Call me when you’re feeling better.” The unspoken ‘and when you’re alone’ hung in the air like a bad smell. She turned on her heel and left, the door swinging shut with a definitive click.

Ben-in-Me sank to the floor behind the counter with a thud. “She thinks we’re having an affair,” he moaned, my voice thick with despair. “She thinks I’m… you’re… we’re… oh, God.”

I looked down at him, at my own body curled up in a ball of misery on my floor, and I felt a complex swirl of emotions. Pity, yes. A hefty dose of schadenfreude. But mostly, a profound sense of clarity. This experiment had been less about punishing him and more about showing me the truth. Our lives were not better or worse; they were just different. His was a gilded cage of expectation and ease; mine was a colourful, chaotic garden that required constant weeding and carried the weight of constant scrutiny.

“Get up, Ben,” I said, not unkindly. “The world hasn’t ended. And you still have six hours to go.”

Chapter 6: The Unravelling and the Return

The afternoon was quieter, mostly because I put a ‘Closed for Inventory’ sign on the door. The drama with Annabel had shattered whatever fragile composure Ben had managed to build. He was a wreck, and seeing my own face contorted in such acute anxiety was deeply disturbing.

We sat in the back room, amid the hanging herbs and the simmering pots. I made tea—proper, strong tea, the way I like it. He sipped it from my favourite mug, his hands—my hands—still shaking.

“This is a nightmare,” he said, his voice hollow. “Everything is… loud. And heavy. And people look at me. All the time. Men… they stare. And it’s not… it’s not a nice stare.”

“Welcome to my world,” I said softly.

He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of something other than fear in his eyes. It was dawning. A slow, painful dawning. “Is it… is it always like this?”

“Not always. But often enough that you learn to calculate it. The route you walk home, the tone of voice you use to let a man down, the way you hold your body to try and deflect attention. It’s a constant low-grade tax on your energy. The ‘male gaze’ isn’t an abstract concept, Ben. It’s the feeling of being a walking target.”

He was silent for a long time, staring into his tea. “My back really hurts,” he said, almost petulantly.

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Ben’s laugh was a rich, warm sound. “I know. I have a very good osteopath. I’ll give you her number.”

He almost smiled. My lips twitched upwards. It was a weird moment.

“Why did you do this, Rosa?” he asked, the question stripped of its earlier anger, leaving only raw curiosity. “Really.”

I took a deep breath. “You saw me as a fling. An experience. The ‘voodoo woman’ with the big boobs. You never saw the business I’ve built, the people I help, the… the person. I wanted you to understand that this,” I gestured to my body, which he was currently occupying, “isn’t just a container. It’s a lived-in, feeling, complicated thing. And the life attached to it is just as complicated.”

He nodded slowly, absorbing this. “I’m… I’m sorry,” he said, and it sounded genuine. “I was a dick.”

“Yes,” I agreed pleasantly. “You were.”

As the evening wore on, a strange camaraderie developed. We were two souls in a lifeboat, adrift in each other’s skins. I told him about some of the crazier client requests. He told me, with surprising candour, about the pressure he felt from his father to succeed in the family firm. We weren’t Rosa and Ben, the failed romance. We were just two people, waiting for a magical clock to run down.

The change, when it came, was as sudden as the first. It started with a tingling in my fingertips—Ben’s fingertips. The world began to swim again, the colours of my shop bleeding into a whirl of light and shadow. I saw Ben-in-Me clutch his—my—head, a look of identical shock on my face.

There was that same sensation of being pulled through a straw, a violent, dizzying lurch, and then…

…I was back.

I was slumped in my armchair. I flexed my fingers. My fingers. I looked down. The world was once again framed by the gentle, magnificent slope of my own breasts. I let out a shuddering sigh of relief. The weight was back, but it was my weight. The familiar ache in my lower back was a welcome homecoming.

Across from me, Ben blinked. He was himself again, all lanky limbs and floppy hair. He looked at his own hands as if he’d never seen them before, then patted his flat chest with profound relief.

We sat in silence for a full minute, just breathing, re-inhabiting ourselves.

“Well,” he said finally, his voice his own. “That was… educational.”

“I did warn you it was a perspective thing,” I said, my voice my own sweet alto again.

He stood up, a little unsteady on his feet. He looked around my shop, and I saw a new respect in his eyes. It wasn’t fascination or fetishization. It was simple acknowledgement.

“I should… I should go,” he said. “I have a lot to… process. And probably an angry girlfriend to placate.”

I walked him to the door. As he stepped out into the twilight, he turned back.

“Rosa?” he said. “For what it’s worth… you’re bloody amazing. I don’t know how you do it.”

It was the first completely genuine, unattached-to-my-body compliment he’d ever given me.

“I know,” I said with a small smile. “Now you know, too.”

He nodded, a slow, thoughtful nod, and walked away.

I closed the door, leaning against it for a moment. The shop was a mess. My body was tired. My soul was… settled. The petty desire for him to want me was gone, burned away in the crucible of shared experience. I didn’t need his love. I had my power, my shop, my heritage, and the profound, unshakeable knowledge of my own strength.

I looked over at the grimoire, still lying on the floor. I walked over, picked it up, and gently closed it. The Exchange des Âmes would not be used again. Some lessons, once learned, don’t need repeating.

Barry jumped down from the top of the bookshelf and wound himself around my ankles, purring.

“I know, Barry,” I said, scooping him up. He immediately started kneading my substantial bosom, a look of pure bliss on his furry face. “It’s good to be home.”