Nothing got fixed overnight. That would be a comfortable lie, and Nora was done with comfortable lies.
There were consequences. There were parents who pulled their children from activities she was involved in. There were town council discussions that went nowhere slowly. There was a week when someone left dead flowers on their front porch, and Nora picked them up without flinching and put them in a compost bin and thought about how things that die can still nourish.
But there were other things too.
Her father took her to breakfast the Saturday after the meeting, just the two of them, and told her he'd been doing research. He'd found three books — actual, academic books — about folk magic traditions and the historical persecution of healers and midwives and herb women across cultures. He slid them across the table without comment and let her cry over them in the back booth of the diner while he drank his coffee and pretended not to notice.
A girl named Priya from the junior class knocked on their door and said, very quietly: "I think I might be like you. I don't know. I don't know what to do." And Nora stood in the doorway of her house and looked at this trembling girl and thought: this is what Vera was to me. And she said: "Come in. I'll make tea."
Maya got accepted to a university across the country and Nora was heartbroken and proud in equal measure, and they sat on Maya's bedroom floor and cried about it together and promised, with the honesty of people who know that life doesn't make keeping promises easy, to try.
Daniel wrote her a letter — an actual letter, paper and ink — in April. It said: I should have stayed. I know why I didn't and I'm not proud of it. I think about the snow that night and I think about you standing at the microphone and I think I was afraid of the wrong thing. I was afraid of what people would say. I should have been afraid of losing you. Those are different. One matters. I hope you're okay.
She read it three times. She didn't write back immediately. She sat with it for two weeks, feeling the weight of it — the honesty in it, the specific shape of its regret. Then she wrote back one line: I know. And I'm okay. And someday maybe we can be, too.
She didn't know if that was true. She hoped it was.
In May, Vera brought the four of them together in the clearing again. It was warm now, the trees full and green, the kind of evening that feels like a held breath before summer. They sat in a circle and Vera said, as she always said: what are you carrying tonight?
Nora thought about it. She thought about the town that still wasn't sure about her, the school that watched her with wary eyes, her mother who was learning to say things she had kept silent for years, her father and his three library books, Maya leaving, Daniel's letter, Priya sitting across from her learning to breathe with intention.
She thought about being seven years old and killing a garden by loving it too hard. She thought about the word witch in faded ink and how it felt like a door opening onto something vast and terrifying and hers.
"I'm carrying less than I was," she said finally. "I'm carrying it better."
Vera nodded. She looked at Nora the way that people look at something that has proved itself — not with surprise, but with a recognition that had always been there, waiting to be named.
The fireflies came out as the last light left the sky. Nora pressed her hands against the earth and felt the charge in her palms move downward — into the soil, into the root systems, into the slow breathing dark beneath everything — and the trees around them glowed faintly, briefly, with a soft and sourceless light.
She had not been born into the right world. She knew that. The world she had been born into was too small for her, too frightened, too certain of its own edges. She had spent seventeen years folding herself to fit it.
She would not do that anymore.
She would be the thing that made the world expand instead. Slowly. Imperfectly. With her hands in the earth and the storm in her chest and her eyes open.
She would be what she was.
And the world, slowly, unevenly, with tremendous resistance and occasional grace, would learn to hold her.