Bouncer Post #13

Title: THE REMEDY

Genre: Commercial Fiction

Word Count: 75,000

Query:

Maggie Cooper has a husband, two kids and a curse. Will McAndrew was the hottest boy Maggie ever met, her first love, and apparently a bit magic as well. He showed up tonight to tell her that they are both under a spell and he knows how to break it. What is a sensible woman to do? She should keep calm and carry on by refusing to believe in magic. If she’s wrong, the curse will destroy her and her family. If she’s right, this is the end of Will and life will go on.

The problem is that Maggie believes Will. Something about his story hits her right in the bones and she knows it’s true. Maggie’s good sense is a match for old magic. She can unravel the spell one step at a time, following Will’s history of betrayals and lost loves. She finds the truth in unexpected places; in the lies old ladies tell her, in Will’s glowering brothers, and piece by piece, in her own cursed heart.

Maggie knows she's splitting her life in half when she’s with Will, but she is taking this risk with her eyes open. She needs to fix this, because magic belongs in fairy tales, and she belongs to this world, to her family and to herself.

First 250:

Maggie has a problem.  Ruin has crept around her since she was nineteen.  Ruin is invisible, even though it swirled around Maggie’s ankles with her wedding dress and waited behind the nurses while her children were born.  Tonight ruin leaves a trail of sparks in the street for Maggie to see.  Maggie has been restless today, and so she goes outside to see for herself what is in the road.  On this cold night, a little trail of embers makes its way to the ancient maple and then stops.  Maggie stops there too; she can hear the branches rustle but nothing else.  She bends to touch the ash and burns her finger.  She puts her finger in her mouth and looks up at the huge ring the branches make in the yellow street light.  Something about this doesn’t seem unexpected at all.  No matter if she’s restless, Jack’s on shift, her kids are in bed and it’s time to walk the half block home.

The kids were sassy right up to bedtime and beyond.  Jack’s shoulder acted up this morning.  Maggie manages her family with good humor and lots of love, and normally that would have been enough for anything that happened today.  But nothing was right, bills and baking were as plain as they always were, but Maggie felt off balance, like the floors had shifted a tiny bit in the old house.