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well then, you’re a huge failure.”
    His posture relaxed. The tension left his shoulders and chest. He gave me a skeptical grin. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘huge’ failure. You wouldn’t feel the need to spy if that was the case.” The grin left. “Or maybe you would.”
    “You mean because I’m a Maroni?”
    He nodded.
    “Tell me why. What do people say about us? What do the Garcias say about us?”
    He paused. “You really don’t know?”
    “I don’t know enough.”
    He still hesitated. “And you want to?”
    “I don’t like being in the dark, and what I’ve heard sounds made-up.” I put some challenge into the words.
    He shrugged one sculpted shoulder. “Accidents happened when your grandmother was on the same circus as my family, years ago. She caused them, and she benefited. She could bestow her curse or her luck on whoever she chose, and no one wants to work with that kind of person. She was discovered. They ran her out on a rail.”
    “That’s not true,” I said. But it was almost exactly what Nan had said the night before. It explained why Dad had never booked big shows despite being the best in the business. Not that I thought for a second Nan had been at fault.
    “What do you know about these so-called accidents? She would never hurt anyone.”
    “People did get hurt, though. Badly. People died.” He went on, quietly. “You can see why I might be disturbed to find you in here.”
    I could, if he believed we were a family of saboteurs with no moral code when it came to hurting others. I tucked a stray hair behind my ear. “I was curious. That’s all.” But there was one thing I didn’t understand. “Do you believe in magic?”
    He studied me, and when his black eyebrows lifted, I noticed the slant of a tiny scar just above the right one. For a second, I thought he was going to make a joke of it. Of me and my question. But his face settled into a serious expression.
    “No,” he said. “But my grandparents did, and my mother does . . . and I do believe that something happened back then that’s hard to explain in other terms. I don’t know if it was magic or not, but it was bad. And your grandmother was to blame.”
    I nodded, though the words hit like a blow. He really believed she’d done terrible things. They all did. It was time for me to head for the door, so I turned.
    “Leaving so soon?” Those words were said lightly, but not the ones that followed. “Don’t go run and tell your boyfriend that I’m doing a quad, because it’s not part of the act. I was just playing around.”
    My boyfriend? “You mean whoever gave me this?” I angled back toward him and touched the rose. When my fingers brushed the corded stem, I shivered inside again.
    He frowned. “No, the blond guy.”
    “You mean Sam?” Even with the shock of falling, and of what he’d relayed about Nan, I couldn’t help it. I laughed so hard that my eyes stung with tears. Dragging in a deep breath, I managed to pull myself together. Mostly.
    As I left, I gave Remy one last look over my shoulder, and let it linger. “You should try it again. An attempt at something great . . . it’s not nothing. And I’ll be bringing my own personal best tomorrow. The Maronis have no need to put a hex on anyone.”

five
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    When I came in, Nan was the only one still up, sitting in her shiny red dressing gown in front of TCM. It was the Barbara Stanwyck movie about the professor collecting slang. I knew all the old classics from our years of watching her favorite films together. She muted it as I came in and settled next to her on the couch. I wanted to try to smooth things over. But when she looked at me, she froze.
    “Jules . . .” She pointed to the rose. “What’s that?”
    “A flower.”
    “Hold still,” she said, and unpinned it from my top. As she held the stem, she went pale, as if instead of holding a rose she was communing with a ghost. “Where did it come from?”
    I