“I am the reason you have a purpose, Gina. You should be thanking me.”
I turned a page with more force than was strictly necessary and kept reading. The section on boundaries was actually useful—it talked about visualization techniques, about imagining your ability as a space you controlled, a room with doors you could open and close.The medium must learn to choose when thedoor is open, Amelia had written in the margin.Otherwise they will never sleep again.
Underlined three times. Poor Amelia.
I closed my eyes. Tried the exercise. Pictured a room—my living room, because I was sitting in it and creativity wasn’t my strong suit at the moment. Pictured a door. Pictured closing it.
Nothing happened. Or rather, everything happened—I could still feel Rosaria’s cold presence from the bookcase, still sense the faint hum of something else beyond the walls of the cottage, like a radio station just out of range. The book said the “thinning” was always present in Starfall Bay, that the geography made the barrier permeable. It compared mediums to people with excellent hearing living next to a highway. You could learn to tune it out. But it was always there.
“You are scrunching your face,” Rosaria said. “You look constipated.”
I opened my eyes. “I’m trying to practice.”
“Practice what? You sat there with your eyes closed for forty-five seconds and accomplished nothing. Your aunt would have been appalled.”
“My aunt left notes in this book about it takingyearsto learn control. Years, Rosaria.”
“We do not have years. We have a murderer who is free and a family that is falling apart and you are sitting on a couch doing breathing exercises.” Her reflection drew itself up to its full spectral height. “Priorities.”
“My priority right now is figuring out how to turn you off.”
“You cannot turn me off. I am not a television.”
“More’s the pity.”
She huffed and disappeared. Not gone—I could feel her somewhere in the house, probably sulking in the bathroom mirror where she’d first appeared, nursing her grudge in the spot where all this had started.
I went back to the book. Found a passage I hadn’t noticed before, near the end of the chapter:
Ghosts who are anchored by violent or sudden death often carry a double burden: the unfinished business of how they died, and the unfinished business of how they lived. The medium should be attentive to both. Resolving the circumstances of death may not be sufficient if the spirit has unresolved emotional attachments that predate the death event.
I read it twice. Picked up my pen. Wrote in the margin, next to Amelia’s notes:Rosaria??
Because Rosaria had unfinished business with everyone. The murder was the obvious thing—the big, loud, impossible-to-ignore thing. But underneath it, there was all the rest: thirty years of criticizing me, of controlling Sal and George and Paula, of building a family on guilt and obligation and calling it love. She hadn’t just died with a murderer unnamed. She’d died with a whole life’s worth of things unsaid.
Maybe that’s why she was stuck to me specifically. Not just because I was the only one who could see her, but because I was the one she’d never bothered to see at all.
That was a depressing thought. I closed the book and went to the kitchen to make more coffee.
The recipe tin caught the afternoon light as I passed. I ran my thumb along the dented lid. Nonna Rosa’s braciole. Tammy had claimed it last night, said we were making it. I hadn’t cooked a real meal in three months—just cereal and toast and whatever came in a can. But the tin was here now, and the kitchen was mine, and maybe this weekend I’d open it up and try something. Not for anyone else. Just because I wanted to.
I was standing at the counter, waiting for the coffee to brew when the knock came.
Three sharp raps. Confident. Not the coven—Lori would’ve called first, Tammy would’ve walked in without knocking, and Jill would’ve knocked and then immediately apologized for knocking too loud. This was someone else.
I set my mug down and went to the door, pausing at the hallway mirror out of habit. Just me. No ghosts.
Paula Ferraro was standing on my front porch with a bottle of wine and no invitation.
My first thought:good, I needed to talk to her anyway.
My second, half a beat later:why is she here?
I hadn’t called Paula. Hadn’t texted, hadn’t dropped hints at the benefit. I’d been planning to reach out, find some casual excuse to ask about the family. But she’d beaten me to it—tracked me down in a town she had no reason to visit, wine in hand like this was a social call.
Was it? Or had someone told her I’d been asking questions?
“Hey.” Paula stood, brushing off her jeans. Paint under her fingernails, cadmium yellow. Same leather jacket she’d worn to every family event for a decade—the one Rosaria called “inappropriate” at least thirty times. “I brought a Malbec and some of those crackers you like. The rosemary ones.”
