And now, I'm a best selling author, a different sort of fairy tale that I still sometimes wonder when I'll wake up from.

You look like a ghost," Bailey says. He can think of no better way to describe it. "You appear the same way to me, so which of us is real?

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

You don't have to be a chef or even a particularly good cook to experience proper kitchen alchemy: the moment when ingredients combine to form something more delectable than the sum of their parts.

The circus looks abandoned and empty. But you think perhaps you can smell caramel wafting through the evening breeze, beneath the crisp scent of the autumn leaves. A subtle sweetness at the edges of the cold.

Why haven’t you asked me how I do my tricks?” Celia asks, once they have reached the point where she is certain he is not simply being polite about the matter. “Because I do not wish to know,” he says. “I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better remain in the dark.

Like stepping into a fairy tale under a curtain of stars.