The curse had been in Catherine’s family for nine generations. It granted wealth, beauty, and longevity—but only to the women, and only until they found true love. Then it consumed them. This was the bargain that her ancestor had made, three hundred years ago, with something that had presented itself as a friend and had proven itself to be something else entirely.

The curse was not a secret. It was the most carefully kept non-secret in a family that was known for its carefully kept secrets. Every woman in Catherine’s line learned about it at sixteen, in a ceremony that was disguised as a birthday celebration but was actually an initiation. They learned the names of all the women who had been taken by the curse: Catherine’s mother at forty-two, her grandmother at thirty-seven, her great-grandmother at twenty-nine. They learned the pattern. They learned to recognize the symptoms.

And they learned, most importantly, the rule: do not fall in love. Do not let yourself feel what you cannot control. Do not make the same mistake that every woman in the family has made, generation after generation, because love is a thing that cannot be resisted and a curse that cannot be escaped and a death that looks, from the outside, like happiness.

Catherine had watched her mother die at forty-two, surrounded by wealth that could not buy her another day and beauty that could not hide the way her body was failing. She had been happy, at the end. That was the worst part. She had found love at forty, and she had known what it would cost her, and she had chosen it anyway. And the curse had taken her the way it took everyone: gently, gradually, as if it was giving her time to say goodbye.

At twenty-five, Catherine decided she would never fall in love. It was not a difficult decision. She had grown up watching the women in her family make the same choice over and over again, choosing love and dying young, choosing the curse and living long. She had seen what both options looked like. She knew which one she preferred.

She took the wealth. She used the beauty. She lived the long life that the curse offered, building a career as a fashion designer in London, amassing a fortune that would have been impressive even without the curse’s help, surrounding herself with the kind of luxury that money could buy when money was not an object. She dated, occasionally. She had affairs, sometimes with people who were attractive and interesting and ultimately forgettable. She never let herself feel.

She became known as the Ice Queen of London society. The press said she was cold, calculating, too focused on her work to have a personal life. They were not entirely wrong. The curse had given her the ability to be cold, to calculate, to maintain a distance from the people around her that was mistaken for professionalism but was actually self-preservation. She had seen what happened when you let people in. She had no intention of letting anyone in far enough to hurt her.

Then she met Thomas.

Thomas was a painter. He was thirty-four, which was young for a painter of his caliber, and he had the kind of easy warmth that Catherine had trained herself to resist. He pursued her for three years. He sent her flowers that she did not respond to. He attended the same parties she attended and found ways to engage her in conversation that she could not avoid without being rude. He painted her portrait, without permission, and then sent it to her as a gift, and she hated how much she liked it.

“I know you’re not interested,” he said to her, on the night she finally agreed to have dinner with him. “I know you have reasons. I don’t need to know what they are. I just need you to know that I’m not going anywhere.”

“That seems like a waste of your time,” she said.

“Probably,” he agreed. “But I’ve found that the things worth having are usually the ones that seem like wastes of time at the beginning.”

She should have said no. Every instinct she had developed over twenty-five years of resisting exactly this situation told her to say no. But Thomas was persistent in a way that was not aggressive, not smothering, not the kind of pursuit that made her feel hunted. He was simply there, always, and eventually she stopped trying to avoid him.

They had an affair. A long one, lasting two years. And then, when she was forty and he was forty-three, he proposed, and she said yes.

The curse had begun before the wedding. Catherine felt it in the changes that started to happen to her body—the slowing of her heart, the fading of her energy, the sense that something was drawing closer and closer and could not be stopped. She had known this would happen. She had known, when she said yes, that she was choosing to die.

She told Thomas on their wedding night. She sat him down and explained the curse, the family history, the bargain that her ancestor had made and the price that every woman in the family had paid. She told him that she loved him, which was the first time she had said it, and that she had known she would love him for three years before she let herself say it, and that she had chosen this knowing exactly what it would cost.

Thomas did not cry. He did not beg her to reconsider. He sat with her for a long time, holding her hand, and then he said: “I would rather have ten years with you than fifty without you. I knew, when I started pursuing you, that you were not the kind of person who did anything halfway. I did not know what the half-measure was in your case. But I knew it would be something significant.”

The curse took her the following year. She was forty-one. She had been married for fourteen months. She died in the house they had bought together, surrounded by the things she had accumulated in a lifetime of resisting attachment, and she was happy in a way that she had never been happy before.

Thomas kept the portrait. He kept painting it, over and over, for the rest of his life. He married again, eventually—his wife understood, or tried to, and she tolerated the portrait that hung in his studio and the fact that he spent every anniversary sitting in front of it, talking to a woman who had been dead for decades.

The curse moved on. It found Catherine’s niece, and her cousin, and her sister’s daughter. It offered them the same bargain it had always offered. And some of them chose love, and some of them chose the long life, and all of them paid the price that had always been asked.

That is the nature of curses. They do not end. They simply pass from one person to the next, waiting for the moment when someone decides that the price is worth paying.