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"Yes."

I felt that one land somewhere I hadn't expected. I'd spent four whole months furious about the exact same thing– everybody telling me that being Queen meant giving something up. My wedding. My coffee shop. My normal, ridiculous, ordinary life. And here was the answer, sitting right in front of me, wearing my dead great-to-the-umpteenth-power-grandmother's face.

"She does not need you dead," Margaret said.

"That's comforting."

"She needs you to refuse."

I felt the floor drop out from under that sentence.

"If you refuse the crown, the Door opens completely." Margaret's eyes never left mine. "That's why she's spent months frightening you. Isolating you. Disrupting your wedding, making the crown feel like a cage instead of a choice. She wants you to reach the exact same conclusion my sister did."

"That I have to choose one or the other."

She slowly nodded. "That was the lie."

"What was?"

"That she ever had to choose at all."

I sat with that. Really sat with it, the way you sit with something that reorganizes every fight you've had for months into one single, obvious shape.

"The crown never required her to abandon her Mate," Margaret said. "Never required her to give up her children, her home, or her life."

She looked right into my eyes like she could see all the way to my soul. "And it doesn't require you to give up yours. Not Kai. Not your family. Not even your ridiculous coffee shop."

"My coffee shop?"

"Don't interrupt."

I bit back a laugh, mostly out of respect for the moment. I figured since I was actually talking to the voicemail of dead Margaret, I had to allow for some mess-ups along the way.

"The crown requires responsibility," Margaret said. "Not misery. A Queen does not stop loving when she wears it. She chooses what she loves. Power follows."

I knew those words. I'd heard them a dozen times over the last four months, scrawled in cramped, careful handwriting in the back of Barney's journal.

"Your Witch wrote that." It was a statement because I knew I was right– this time.

Margaret's mouth softened, just slightly. "She understood me better than most."

"Then what happened to your Guardian?"

I hadn't meant to ask it that fast. It came out anyway. Happened to me a lot.

Something shifted behind Margaret's eyes, old grief wearing new edges.

"He was my Mate," she said. "He died defending the Door. His death was never required." Her voice sharpened, ancient and furious all at once. "Do not turn my greatest loss into a requirement."

The Guardian shall fall. Those words were engraved on my brain.

"Everyone's been treating that like Destiny," I said slowly.

"It was history."

"History everybody keeps trying to repeat."

"Then don't."