Chloe saw it and gasped. “Mark?”
Cora didn’t flinch. She pulled a small, antique silver pendulum from a pocket inside her cloak. It wasn’t showy, just a simple teardrop on a fine chain. It caught the candlelight and threw tiny, dancing stars onto the tablecloth.
Cora’s voice became the only real thing in the room. It wove around the clinking ice in Mark’s scotch, the crackle of the fire, the distant sound of sleigh bells from a TV commercial. She spoke of deep forests, of soft snowfall, of the perfect, heavy silence after a storm. She didn’t erase their personalities; she just… unclenched them.
That would be fun to untangle.
No one had wanted to invite Cora. She was Mark’s eccentric younger cousin, the one who’d dropped out of medical school to run a “hypnotherapy and holistic resonance” studio in a refurbished shipping container. She arrived late, wearing a velvet cloak the color of a thunderstorm and carrying a fruitcake that looked alarmingly like a lump of clay.
The annual Joule Family Christmas Eve dinner was a masterclass in performative joy. Silverware clinked against bone china like tiny, polite warning bells. Beneath the garlands of pine and the soft glow of beeswax candles, old resentments festered like uninvited guests.
Cora leaned forward, setting her water glass down with a soft, deliberate clink . “Actually, Aunt Lila,” she said, her voice as smooth as the eggnog no one was drinking. “I think I can help with that.”
“And now,” Cora murmured, the pendulum coming to a stop in her palm, “when I count down from three to one, you will all feel a deep, abiding sense of peace. The perfect, simple peace of a silent night. No arguments. No resentments. Just the quiet joy of being together. Three… two… one.”
Cora sat in her corner, eating a slice of her clay-like fruitcake, which she had secretly laced with a calming, non-psychoactive tincture of chamomile and skullcap. The pendulum was back in her pocket.
Mark, who had been staring at the ceiling fan with a blissful, empty smile, obediently took a bite. “Wow,” he breathed. “It’s like… a yam from a dream.”
“Enough,” Lila finally snapped, her voice cutting through the wailing. “This is Christmas . Can we please just… be happy for one hour?”
Cora just smiled, adjusting her velvet cloak. “Hypnosis isn’t about control, Aunt Lila,” she said. “It’s about permission. You all just finally gave yourself permission to be happy.”