I liked the way she was when she first got here. She was fierce, because she didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know what she was up against. Not just me, but everything, the present, the past, the history. She didn’t know that with one simple thing like believing in a story that a little boy – our little boy – told her, she could change the course of all of our lives forever.

She didn’t know what it would mean for me. For my life, for my little family. She didn’t know what I had done. She didn’t know what had been done to me. Nobody did, which was one of the advantages of the curse. They may have feared me as their mayor, but they loathed me as their queen, and that was worse. Emma didn’t know that breaking the curse would take away the small piece of freedom I had given myself, freedom to lead a life that wasn’t controlled by magic, by my mother, by my own darkness.

I had a lot to lose. What I didn’t know was that I had even more to gain.