I had lost the people I loved and I had accepted that death was something I could not control. But after seeing that strange woman in every photograph, I could no longer tell myself that their deaths were simply a terrible coincidence.
I needed answers.
I began asking questions about my family, especially about my father.
That was how I learned about Grace.
Before my father married my mother, he had loved another woman.
Grace had stayed with him when he had nothing. She had believed in him, supported him and remained by his side through the difficult years.
Then my father left her.
He chose my mother and married her.
Grace was devastated. She had felt betrayed after giving him the best years of her life. In her bitterness, she had sworn that my father would pay for what he had done.
Those words frightened me now.
I had to find her.
It took time, but I eventually did.
When I told her about my family and why I had come, she was shocked. She admitted that she had made those threats but insisted they had been nothing more than the angry words of a woman with a broken heart.
She had never done anything to my his family. She had moved on. She had even married another man who, according to her, had treated her far better than my father ever did.
Then I showed her the photographs.
I pointed to the strange woman standing in the background.
Grace stared at the pictures. Her face changed. She recognized the woman immediately. It was her mother.
But her mother had been dead for years.
For a moment, neither of us knew what to say. Grace contacted her older sister, the person who had been closest to their mother before her death.
Her sister remembered something.
She vaguely recalled their mother threatening to deal with my father after he abandoned Grace.
She had assumed it was simply the anger of a mother who could not bear to see her daughter hurt.
She had never imagined that their mother would actually act on the threat.
But now, looking at the photographs, there was very little left to dismiss as coincidence.
The woman who might have started it all was dead. And that was the problem.
Nobody knew exactly what she had done.
Nobody knew what power she had used.
And nobody knew how to stop it.
I was exhausted.
For years, I had lived with loss without understanding it. Now I had finally found something that could explain it.
I had lost too many people already.
I was not going to sit and wait for another death. I was not going to fold my hands and watch death come for my children. No way!
Whatever my father had done to Madam Grace, I had not done it.
I was not responsible for his choices.
I was not going to spend the rest of my life paying for his mistakes.
Grace’s mother was dead.
Whatever she had started was not.
And I was going to find a way to end it.
I did not know where to begin.
I did not know what I was fighting against. But I knew one thing.
I had spent my entire life losing the people I loved. I was not going to lose anyone else without a fight.
This whole thing made ma start thinking that sometimes, the people who love us so deeply want to fight our battles for us that they end up hurting innocent people in the process.
Grace had been hurt by my father. Her mother had seen her pain and wanted to protect her. But somewhere along the way, a mother’s love had become something dark and the consequences had fallen on people who had never wronged her.
My mother had paid for a wound she did not create, my siblings and Eben, the man who had given me fifteen beautiful years, had paid too.
None of them had anything to do with the heartbreak that started it all.
It taught me something I would never forget.
Sometimes, the person fighting for you may cause more damage than the person who hurt you.
Sometimes, words spoken in pain do not end with the person who hears them. Not everyone who listens to your pain knows what to do with it.
Some people will pray for you.
Some will comfort you.
And some will take your pain and turn it into a battle you never asked them to fight.
The saddest part was that none of my loved ones had to die. They were simply caught in a battle that was never theirs.
I was not the one who started the war but I was the one left to bury its victims.
The battle line had been drawn. The war to end the deaths in my family was about to begin. I did not know what was waiting for me on the other side or what it would cost me to end this. But for the first time, I was not afraid of what was coming. I was ready.
Whatever this was, I would face it. I had lost enough. I would not lose anyone else. And I knew one thing with absolute certainty: this time, death would not have the final word.