“Earthquake,” Gordon supplied. “At least that’s what it felt like.”
“Do they have earthquakes in Connecticut?” Eustace asked, surprised.
Cordelia pushed her hair back from her face, breathing hard. “They do now,” she said, and stepped out of the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWOTHELETTER
WHENEUSTACE FOUNDher, she was sitting on the steps to the crypt, a plucked rose in one hand, her cell phone in the other. She’d texted the divorce attorney already.Give him everything he wants. The business, the house, all of it. I want to sign as soon as possible.
Let him handle the mortgage company and the mold contractors. She needed to sign the divorce decreebeforethey settled the will, so there’d be some delineation. She couldn’t let John tie up their inheritance in a yearslong legal battle. She doubted he could win against the dynasty trust, but he could certainly make things difficult—and expensive—for them. She would not let him ruin this life for her too.
“Interesting location to lick your wounds,” her sister said.
Cordelia cinched her brow. “He never loved me, did he?”
“The only person that man knows how to love is himself.” She sighed, taking a seat beside Cordelia. “I should have let you clobber him with that candlestick. I knew I was going to regret talking you out of that.”
Cordelia grinned.
“What happened between you two in the dining room?” sheasked, turning Cordelia’s chin this way and that to get a better look at her neck.
“Nothing he didn’t deserve,” she said bitterly.
“We should get some ice on that,” Eustace told her.
She touched the bruises tenderly. “I was so desperate to fit in, to look and feel like everybody else, that I let that man use me. I couldn’t have been more blind if I’d plucked out my eyes.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Eustace told her. “You see clearly now. That’s what matters.”
Cordelia looked at the rose in her hand, the way its delicate petals lay one atop another, growing stronger with every layer. She did see clearly now. She had changed.
“I have something to share with you,” Eustace told her.
Cordelia looked up.
“While you were brooding in that boudoir upstairs for the last three days, I was working on something in the book,” she said.
“The book?”
Eustace pulled the journal they’d found from under her shirt and laid it across her lap. She opened to the first page. “It’s called a therimoire,” she told Cordelia. “A kind of record of magic workings. Like a cookbook for spells and rituals. This one is very old. It came with our ancestors from England.”
“How do you know?”
“It says right here,” Eustace told her. “Therimoire of the Bone witches, as transcribed by Omen & Sabina Bone—1776.”
“Wow,” Cordelia said. “You cracked it.”
“I did,” her sister said. “But there’s something else. Something you should see.” She flipped to the last page, the final entry. “This one is different from all the rest. Most of these entries are original. Some have been added over the years, which is evident because the script changes, but they still look like they’ve beenin here a very long time. This one, though… This one is new. Like,newnew. The ink, the handwriting, the format. And this is a date, like I first thought, inverted.”
“What do you mean?” Cordelia asked her.
“I mean, someone else, or many others, wrote the rest of this. But this last page—our aunt Augusta wrote that.” Eustace rapped her sister’s shoulder. “She wrote itto us.”
“Like, a letter?” Cordelia asked now, finally understanding her sister’s excitement.
“Notlikea letter. Itisa letter.”
“What does it say?” She realized that this could crack everything open, make sense of all the random events, fill in all the blanks she and Eustace had. This wasn’t just big. This was huge.
