Sangu Mandanna - The Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping
She saw the memory through his eyes. And what she saw, for the first time, was not ugliness at all but pain so enormous and consuming that it had felt like dying.
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I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self. I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.
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“I’ll take it because it means she’s still her. It means she’s not disappearing inside herself, she’s not putting miles of empty, frozen space between the real Posy and other people, she’s not going quiet.”
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[...] there was, nevertheless, something rather lovely about the weird, wonderful, ordinary everydayness of living. Flowers in teacups and the pages of books turning themselves and ghosts lingering at the edges, waiting, wanting something from her that she could never name. The familiar, comforting routines of casting heat spells, hitting old pipes with a hammer to make them behave, tripping over the undead rooster, baking loaves of crusty bread, drinking sugary tea and boozy coffee.