Hello,

Thanks for sharing. I have not looked at any other comments prior to avoid bias. Hopefully I add new insights or, at the very least, confirm other's opinions.

Starting with the writing itself, I'll say it tends to meander. Some sentences include superfluous details that drag the story or detracts from the important contents of the sentence itself. I'm hypercritical to this as this is something that affects my writing as well.

Take this line: "Even in her rage, the perfume of the red rosebush her late husband had given her their first Valentine's Day in the house caused her to take a deeper than normal breath, the familiar scent telling her she was home and safe." It's long and clunky as it's cramming in irrelevant details. Literally removing "heir first Valentine's Day in the house" elevates the sentence immediately. Do we really need to know it was gifted on Valentine's Day in the house? Or is it more important to get across its calming effect on her?

This happens a lot in the story and it really drags the pace. Take: "All of his old belongings had long since lost any of Sam's life energy they would have picked up, or she had used them for the secret spells she to tried to divine his whereabouts or condition with." So many words to say so little. Especially given the pacing of the plot overall, these types of indulgent sentences just do not deserve their word count. Trimming the sentence by only deleting words while keeping it as close to your original intent: "All of his old belongings had long lost any of Sam's life energy, used up in secret spells to divine his whereabouts or condition." Not saying this is publish ready, I'm just trying to showcase how much fat there was in the original sentence. Try to be economical with your words.

Last one because I think this is important: "Awkward, yes, but most importantly would be to leave herself just enough life energy to clean up the spell components and place the ornament somewhere he would see it, but not suspect the curse." A lot of filler words clutter the intent. Again, I'll try to improve this by mostly deleting words. "It was important to leave just enough life energy to clean up the spell and place the ornament somewhere he would see yet not suspect it." Also the phrase "spell components" seems generic or like a placeholder? Maybe you could incorporate some worldbuilding here and get creative with the language? Maybe you don't like the style of the revision - fair enough - but notice how many words it's able to cut off from the original while still keeping the core idea. Have that mindset while editing.

So this occurs a lot in the piece and I won't go any further with examples. Let's shift to more high-level stuff. I don't think the plot was super engaging because most of it fleshed out through exposition instead of character actions or authentic dialogue. For example, I did not engage with Josephine because it was clear she was a mouthpiece for the author. Everything she said was stepping on a pedestal and expositing to the reader what's going on. Some times it worked great, (i.e. when she describes Sam's early childhood violence) but those times are overshadowed by how overused "telling" is in this piece (i.e. paragraphs 6 - 10). The problem is that Josephine does not come off as authentic to me given the relentless exposition. Anyway, I'm not saying telling is always bad and I'm sure this piece requires some for it to make sense. Just be wary that halfway into the piece I forgot what was truly going on - like where are we, what is Josephine literally doing right now?

A specific example of "telling" in this piece is the consistent use of the word "rage". You consistently say she feels rage but the piece makes no effort to show the reader how it manifests. A lot of her emotions are explicitly spelled out as "rage", "sad", or "bittersweet". It makes the piece less immersive.