Read When Libby Met the Fairies and her Whole Life Went Fae for Free Online Page A

But it made Cal4 look positively angelic. Robbie, of course, grumbled about it. When he was in a bad mood, he called it Sappy Tones or Stink Tones and complained about how much it cost. But on good days he knew it was fabulous and very, very cheap PR. And he got calls from people about it all the time, which helped. Media bigwigs, some of them. Libby was listed on the masthead as editor, but Robbie got the bigwig calls. Then afterwards, he’d be all gung-ho again and call it Spin Tones for a couple of days.
    The newsletter’s main story this month featured a woman who’d been misdiagnosed. She’d been told she had skin cancer, but it turned out it was a garden variety seborrhoeic dermatitis that responded to topical ketoconazole. The only weird thing was, Libby got the feeling the woman didn’t really understand that it had never been a malignancy. She seemed to think the ointment had cured her of cancer. Libby didn’t put that part in the article, though. Just focused on how ecstatic the woman was about her skin clearing up. Nor was there any reason to get into how she felt about the doc who’d pronounced the C-word and scared her almost out of her mind.
    But Libby thought about it a lot afterward, about how others’ skewed interpretations of the so-called facts can become other peoples’ nightmares. If people don’t have enough savvy to take a deep breath once in awhile and say, maybe he’s wrong, maybe she’s wrong, maybe it’s not so bad, maybe it’s really nothing at all, maybe it’s not really a malignancy after all.
    That doctor who’d diagnosed the woman, something had happened. But what? What had made him decide he was looking at a malignancy instead of a benign and fairly common dermatitis?
    There were two kinds of people in the world. People who were faithful to the facts, and people who weren’t. But now a disturbing new thought occurred to Libby.
    What if something might come between a fact and someone’s own two eyes? Something out of a person’s control?
    Vaguely, she recognized, that during her marriage, she had resisted the temptation to become jealous for this very reason. Had she allowed herself to become jealous of Wallace’s girlfriends, her ability to perceive the facts of their marriage would have been impaired.
    She was proud of that. She’d been in control.
    Was the doctor who’d seen a fictional cancer also in control?
    Of course he was. He’d been careless. Undisciplined. That had to be the explanation.
     
    ♦ ♦ ♦
     
    It had started raining again while she was working. Maisey and Tyler were out, somewhere, in Maisey’s car—when you live in the country, you pretty much have to be out in a car if you’re going to be out at all—and Libby was editing her feature for about the fifth time when the door slammed and Maisey came in, shouting for her.
    “Aunt Libby! You should see it out there!”
    Libby looked out the window.
    Everything was gleaming faintly. And then it hit her: she was looking at a glaze of ice.
    Maisey had made it to the office door by then. “It’s totally freezing rain out there! We almost went off the road, like, fifteen times!”
    “Well, I’m glad you’re back safe. You made it to the grocery store, I assume?” Their drain on her food stores had become a bit of a sore point.
    “Oh yeah. All stocked up. Tyler’s bringing it in.”
    ♦ ♦ ♦
     
    Libby worked awhile more, massaging the article into shape, then took a break and got up and looked out the window again. A bit of late afternoon sun had broken through the clouds in the west and the ice coating on the trees along the road caught the sunlight and shimmered, a coat of lacquered gold.
    She stood for a minute, looking. Rain and sun at the same time, there had to be a rainbow out there to the east.
    She wanted to be outside.
    Wanted to see the rainbow and have that shimmery gold all around her.
    She went downstairs and put on her coat. Maisey and Tyler were standing in front of the