She huffed. Actually huffed, which was impressive for a woman without functioning lungs. Then her gaze drifted to the coffee table, where the wedding album was still open to the photo of twenty-two-year-old me in my mother’s dress.
She went still.
Not the rigid stillness of disapproval. Something else. She was looking at the photo the way you look at a road you took a long time ago, knowing you can’t go back to the fork.
“You were so young,” she said. Quietly. Not to me, exactly. To the room, or to herself, or to the version of her that had stood at that wedding and told her son he was making a mistake. “I forget that. How young you were. How young we all were, before we became the people our choices made us.”
Then she said, “Your bouquet was wrong for the season. White roses in June. Gardenias would have been far more appropriate,” and disappeared.
I stood there looking at the empty mirror. Lori was watching me with those clinical eyes, and I knew she’d felt the shift in the room even if she hadn’t heard the words.
“She said something real,” Lori said. Not a question.
“For about three seconds. Then she criticized my wedding flowers.”
“Three seconds is a start.”
Tammy had finished wrapping the ornaments—tissue paper doubled, because she’d heard me relay the critique and wasn’t about to give a ghost the satisfaction of being right. Jill was stacking the photo albums on the shelf next to Aunt Amelia’s books on mediumship. My grandmother’s recipe tin sat on the counter next to the herbs, brass and dented and smelling faintly of olive oil, and it looked like it belonged there. Like it had been waiting for this kitchen.
Lori pulled on her coat. Tammy collected her casserole dish. Jill lingered in the doorway, holding the paper napkins she’d brought and apparently forgotten to use.
“Same time Tomorrow?” Jill asked. Then caught herself. “Sorry. That sounded like I was scheduling a meeting. Old habits. What I mean is—this was nice. Can we do this again? Not the ornament explosion part. The rest of it.”
“Tomorrow night at my place,” Tammy said, squeezing my arm on her way out. “But this was good too. Sometimes you need to make a mess in somebody’s living room to feel like you belong there.”
They left. I locked the door. The cottage was warm and smelled like chicken tetrazzini and wine and the faint cedar of old cardboard, and the five boxes were empty and broken down by the recycling bin, and the things that had been inside them were on shelves and mantles and counters where I could see them.
On the mantle, Nick’s popsicle-stick star caught the lamplight. The wedding album was closed, spine out, a woman I used to be tucked between the covers.
I finished my wine. It was the good stuff—Tammy didn’t bring anything that wasn’t—and I drank it standing up, leaningagainst the counter, looking at a kitchen that was finally starting to look like mine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I wastwo-thirds of the way through Chapter Four ofWhen the Veil Thinsand trying very hard to pretend the dead woman in my peripheral vision wasn’t reading over my shoulder.
The cottage was quiet for the first time in days. The coven had left the night before, taking their wine glasses and their warmth and Jill’s twelve-pack of paper napkins with them, and the silence they’d left behind wasn’t the bad kind anymore. It was the kind of silence that happens when a space has been filled up and is still holding the shape of it. Nick’s popsicle-stick star sat on the mantle. My grandmother’s recipe tin gleamed on the counter next to Aunt Amelia’s herbs, brass and battered and smelling like Sunday dinner at a house that didn’t exist anymore.
I’d woken up that morning and made coffee in a kitchen that looked like someone lived in it. That someone being me. It was a strange feeling. Good-strange, but strange.
So I’d done the thing I’d been putting off. I pulled Amelia’s book off the shelf—the real one,When the Veil Thins: A Practical Guide, not the beginner stuff Lori had mentioned at the coffee shop—and sat down on the couch with a pen and a notebook like I was back in college, which was thirty years ago and a different life entirely, but the muscle memory of studyingwas still in there somewhere, buried under decades of grocery lists and school permission slips.
The book was dense. Amelia had annotated it in the margins, her handwriting small and slanted, and some of the notes were practical (try lavender oil on the temples) and some were personal (M. appeared again today, angry, won’t say why) and some were just single words circled and underlined:Boundaries. Control. Patience.
Patience. Sure. I’d get right on that.
“You are reading too slowly,” Rosaria said.
She’d materialized in the glass front of the bookcase about twenty minutes ago and had been providing unsolicited commentary ever since. Her reflection was slightly distorted by the curve of the glass, which made her look wider than she’d been in life. I was petty enough to enjoy that.
“I’m taking notes.”
“You are drawing circles around words. That is not notes. That is doodling.” She peered at the book from her glass prison. “What chapter are you on?”
“Four. ‘Establishing Boundaries with Persistent Spirits.’” I held it up so she could see the title. “Seemed relevant.”
“Hilarious. Skip to Chapter Seven. ‘Communication with the Newly Deceased.’ That is the one that matters.”
“Chapter Four matters.You’rethe reason Chapter Four matters.”
