Ineeded a damn drink.

    We’d finished up a long day restoring the rear galleries of a Victorian double off Burgundy—hand-sanding shutters and repointing mortar on a wall that looked like it’d survived two centuries of hurricanes, termites, and men with more ego than skill.

    My hands were raw, and usually working like that meant my mind was quiet—but since I’d seen Naomi with Jonah at the Marigny Opera House, my mind was a fucking wastnd.

    I’d gone to the trunk show on Saturday, the day after the runway. Naomi had been pleasant and distant. It had been so bad that even Kadisha felt bad for me, and she usually wanted to chop my balls off for hurting her favorite person in the world.

    The good news was that Jonah hadn’t been there.

    I hadn’t been able to see her on Sunday, as I had made ns to go fishing with my father.

    We spent a quiet day out in Hopedale, where the marsh met the sky and the only sound was thezyp of water against the boat and the asional birdcall slicing through the stillness.

    We didn’t talk much. That wasn’t the point.

    We baited our lines, cast into the calm, brackish water, and let the silence do what it did best—hold space for whatever couldn’t be said out loud.

    The sun rose slow and hazy over the reeds. We caught a few redfish, a couple of specks.

    We cooked them at home, ckened on the cast iron, simple, buttery, lemon-slick.

    It should’ve been peaceful. It was, in every way that counted.

    Except I was still fucked up over Naomi.

    “You look like someone killed your dog,” Delphi announced as he handed me a beer and took a seat across from me.

    We were at a half-warped table inside Lafitte’s cksmith Shop, the bar dim and flickering with candlelight, always feeling like it was a second away from copsing in on its own haunted history. The stone walls breathed moisture. The bartenders didn’t rush. And the piano in the corner was either being tuned or exercised, depending on the hour.

    “I’m fine.”

    He gave me a long look. Delphi wasn’t the kind of guy to pry, but he could read me like a blueprint. I’d known him for years—crew lead, sounding board, the closest thing I had to a brother who hadn’te out of my mama’s womb.

    “You wanna tell me why you’ve been dragging your sorry ass around like somebody buried your dog?”

    “What’s with all the dog references? I don’t even have one.”

    “Maybe you need one,” Delphi suggested. “You know what they say?”

    I raised an eyebrow as I took a long pull of beer.

    “A dog is a man’s best friend,” he finished sincerely.

    I let out a short bark ofughter.

    “Come on, you’ve been like a wounded warrior for weeks…maybe months.”

    I rubbed my jaw. “I fell in love. Then I fucked it up.”

    He blinked. “The lingerie girl?”

    “She has a name. Naomi.”

    “She’s hot.”

    I red at him.

    “And you fucked it up?”

    I sighed.

    He let out a slow whistle and took a sip of his drink. “Damn. Thought you were smart.”

    “Me, too.”

    “This got to do with the girl who died?”

    For all his vapidments, Delphi was insightful, especially when it came to me since we’d known each other a long time.

    I took another long pull of beer in response.

    “You were a passenger in that car that day when it went down,” Delphi remarked. “Maybe it’s time to grab the wheel now?”

    Like I said, insightful.

    Two tourists wandered over. They had matching sunburns. “Hi, we’re looking for a ce called Three Muses?”

    “Frenchmen Street,” Delphi told them. “Go down the street, you’ll hit Decatur, keep going and cross Esnade, and you’ll be on Frenchmen. You’ll hear the music before you see it. Three Muses will be just up ahead on the right. They’ve got a killer set on Thursdays. Brazilian jazz, if you’re lucky.”

    “Thanks,” the guy said and then looked at us. “Are you local?”

    We nodded.

    The woman with him cleared her throat. “Can you suggest a ce to eat? I love Louisiana barbecue shrimp.”

    I grinned. “Mr. B’s. Down Royal across from Hotel Monteleone. They give you a bib with your food. Ask for extra bread. You’re gonna want to mop up the sauce.”

    Delphi smirked, looking after the couple as they walked away. “Tourists love a little voodoo and jazz and hot sauce. Think they’re gonna leave here enlightened?”

    I sipped my beer. “Maybe they will.”

    “Speaking of voodoo,” he continued casually, “You ever go see my aunt’s shop on Dumaine?”

    I gave him a look. “Man, don’t start.”

    “She’s legit,” he protested. “No tourist crap. Real Haitian roots. She does readings, cleansings. You need more than beer to get that curse of heartbreak off your back.”

    “I’m not cursed.”

    He raised an eyebrow. “You’re in love with a woman who won’t talk to you, and you’re still sleeping with the ghost of your first love who died next to you. That sounds like a curse to me.”

    I sent him a sideways nce that could’ve lit a fuse.

    He didn’t exactly harangue me, but after we polished off our beers, Delphi managed to drag me to see his aunt, like I was having a spiritual emergency.

    There were three kinds of people in New Orleans at any given time: the skeptics, the believers, and the tourists too drunk to know which one they were.

    Delphi was firmly in the second camp.

    He lived in a converted condo inside St. Elizabeth’s Chapel—a red-brick Gothic Revival church-turned-luxury residence in the Garden District. Originally built in the mid-1800s as part of a Catholic orphanage, the chapel had long been deconsecrated and rehabbed into high-end units with soaring ceilings, arched windows, and just enough lingering eeriness to keep the ghost stories alive.

    Delphi swore his ce was haunted—not in a doors-mming, dishes-breaking manner, but a gentle haint who he was sure was someone’s granddaddy. He said the presence mostly just turned on lights, shuffled papers, and asionally changed the channel when Delphi was watching something where there was too much swearing or sex.

    He had his palm read monthly, got his aura cleansed with smudge sticks, and once dated a woman who made custom gris-gris bags out of recycled Mardi Gras beads.

    And yet, he was the most level-headed guy on my crew.

    That was New Orleans for you.

    His aunt’s shop didn’t have a name, just a sign out front that said: ‘Now go do that Voodoo that you do so well.’

    “zing Saddles,” I remarked mockingly.

    “Auntie Griselle is a big Mel Brooks fan,” Delphi exined.

    “Griselle? I thought her name was Mama Lune?”

    Delphi shrugged. “Branding…she felt like she needed a change. So Griselle from gris-gris, you get it?”

    What I was getting was that I was an idiot for letting Delphi bring me to a freaking con artist.

    I ran a hand down my face. “What’s her real name?”

    “Jane,” he said on a cackle.

    Inside, Auntie Griselle’s shop was a cave of velvet, bone, and shadow. We were greeted by a flickering candle, and a faint scent of clove, myrrh, and smoke.

    “Enh, my boy!” Auntie Griselle wrapped her arms around her nephew, kissed his cheek with a loud smack. “Delphi, chéri, you been keepin’ outta trouble, hmm?”

    She woreyers of ck and red, silver rings on every finger, and a head wrap tied like a crown. Her skin was deep brown and smooth as carved stone.

    “I brought my friend…my boss, Gage, over.” Delphi gently peeled himself out of the velvet-and-incense hug and nudged me forward like he was handing me over to the spirits.

    “Gage, meet my Auntie Griselle.”

    She was barefoot on the wooden floor, her long skirt brushing the tops of her toes. Bracelets clinked on both wrists. A scarf the color of blood oranges wrapped her hair in a towering crown, and her eyes—dark, knowing, amused—sparkled like she was already three steps ahead of whatever I came in thinking.

    “Tchèl mwen!” she cried, arms wide, her voice a rhythmic blend of Haitian cadence and Quarter mischief. “You got eyes like a man sleepin’ with ghosts and dreamin’ ’bout a woman he let slip through his fingers.”

    I red at Delphi. He’d obviously told her about my situation.

    She pointed to the velvet-covered chair across from her. “Sit down, bébé. You’re leaking heartache all over my floor.”

    Delphi pped a hand on my shoulder and muttered, “Good luck,” before slipping out like a man who’d narrowly escaped a curse.

    I sat, unsure what the hell I’d walked into.

    Herbs were drying in bunches from the rafters.

    A candle flickered inside a teacup.

    Shelves were crowded with bottles, bones, and old photographs, which included a portrait of Baron Samedi next to a signed photo of Michelle Obama.

    “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I admitted, voice low.

    She raised a perfectly arched brow. “You know why you here, bébé. You just ain’t thinkin’ your mouth would betray your heart today.”

    Then, without breaking eye contact, she reached under the table, pulled out a chipped crystal ss. She poured a dark amber liquid from a bottle that looked older than the gasmps lining Bourbon Street.

    “Drink,” she ordered. “Then we start where all healing starts: with the truth.”

    I looked at the ss. Well, she was Delphi’s aunt, so she probably wouldn’t poison me.

    I took a tentative sip…it burned like a motherfucker.

    I coughed while she regarded me thoughtfully and then downed the ss she poured for herself like a shot.

    “Now,e on, bébé, tell me about the girl you lost?”

    “Which girl?” I set the ss down, feeling heat rise through me.

    “Let’s start with the first one,” she suggested softly.

    Maybe there was something about witches and potions because I found myself telling her everything. Not all at once. Not easily. But the words came.

    About Lia and the crash.

    About Naomi, and the stupid, terrified way I’d let her down.

    About holding my breath for a decade and only exhaling now—toote, when Naomi was probably already halfway in love with Jonah fucking Lamarre.

    She didn’t interrupt. Didn’t murmurforting titudes or offer convenient spells as I’d expected.

    She just listened, her eyes like dark pools, as she ran her fingers absently through a string of ck onyx beads.

    When I was done, I felt raw. Shaky. Like I’d peeled myself open in a room that smelled like sage and rosewater and cloves.

    What the fuck am I doing?

    “You want Naomi back?” she asked.

    “Yes.”

    “You want peace?”

    “Desperately.”

    She nodded, leaned back in her chair, and for a long moment said nothing.

    “I have no idea why I’m talking to you,” I blurted out.

    She grinned. “Would it help, bébé, if I told you I have a PhD in psychology?”

    I blinked at her and then had to close my jaw. “What?”

    She rotated her neck from side to side, and sighed borately. “Dr. Jane Lapointe. PhD. Clinical psychology. Tne. Private practice uptown.”

    I looked around the store.

    “That voodoo auntie thing? That’s just my side hustle.” She winked. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get men into therapy unless they think they’re being hexed.”

    I let out a softugh. “I thought the drink was hexed.”

    “Just your garden variety amaro—well, literally garden variety because it’s homemade.” She pulled a tiny Moleskine notebook from under a tarot deck and flipped it open. “Now that you’ve confessed to my alter ego, you’ve officially had your intake session, bébé.”

    “What’s your diagnosis?”

    “Have you ever been in therapy before?”

    I shook my head.

    “Well then, let me burst your bubble. Therapy is a process where you learn more about yourself so you can live authentically and well. What therapy is not is Tylenol that you can pop and vo, the headache is gone.”

    My eyes narrowed in confusion.

    “Now, what I can tell you is that you are textbook grief-avoidant, romantically dissociative, and emotionally constipated. But you’re trying. I’ll give you that.”

    I let out a rustyugh. “So…I should probably make an appointment with Dr. Lapointe?”

    She smirked and shrugged. “Yes. You cane to my office on Prytania. Or you cane back here and spill your guts next to Baron Samedi and my grandma’s old spice rack. Whatever gets you talking.”

    She wandered to one of the shelves and came back with a small muslin pouch of herbs. She dropped them on the table in front of me.

    “Let me leave you with this, Gage, what you’re feeling is normal. You are normal. You think you’re broken, fucked up…you’re not. Death is traumatic, and how you lost Lia is not something you just get over—healing requires effort, which I think you’re finally making.”

    I picked up the bag of herbs and sniffed it. Rosemary. Sage. And other things….

    “When we grieve, we let the dead lead us deeper into the woods and forget that the living don’t need us haunting them; they need us toe home.”

    “Which is what Naomi needs?” I mused.

    Her features softened with tenderness. “You know how they say in airnes you have to put the mask on yourself first? Right now, you need to heal, and then you’ll be in a ce to heal Naomi from the hurt you caused her.”

    I walked out of Auntie Griselle/Mama Lune/Dr. Jane Lapointe’s shop with a pouch of herbs (for tea, it’ll be cleansing, bébé) in my pocket, and a thousand new thoughts crowding my brain, the main one that what I was feeling was grief and it was something I could heal from. My problems weren’t exclusive to me, they were normal.

    I had to give it to Delphi.

    If he’d suggested seeing his aunt, who’s a therapist, I’d have flipped him off—hell, I still didn’t know how he managed to get me to see his Voodoo Auntie Griselle, but I was grateful he had.