I’d spent thirty years at tables where I was performing. Smiling at the right moments, laughing at Sal’s jokes, agreeing with Rosaria’s opinions, clearing the plates while the real conversations happened without me. I’d never once sat at a table and thought:these people see me. Not the version of me I’m presenting. Me.
This was that table.
Tammy caught my expression and tilted her head, her aura-reading eyes going soft and focused at the same time. Whatever she saw made her smile—not the big warm public Tammy smile, but a smaller one. Private. Like she was reading a letter meant only for her.
“You’re changing color again,” she said. “More orange. Less gray.”
“Is orange good?”
“Orange is alive. Orange is very, very good.”
We closed up at midnight. Tammy locked the back door. Lori distributed assignments for Saturday like a general briefing her troops—arrival times, phone check-ins, contingency plans. Jill folded the legal pad with the floor plan inside and tucked it under her arm like classified documents.
On the sidewalk, under a streetlight that turned the November fog orange, Jill stopped walking and looked at the three of us.
“I just want to say,” she started, and then her voice did the thing it did when she was trying not to feel something, going tight and precise and slightly too fast, “that regardless of the outcome of tomorrow’s operation, from a personal standpoint, this has been—I mean, the overall trajectory of—what I’m trying to articulate is?—”
“We love you too, Jill,” Tammy said.
Jill exhaled. “Yes. That. Thank you.”
I drove home alone. The cottage was dark, and I checked the locks twice, and the deadbolt was cold under my fingers. Tomorrow we were going to break into my ex-mother-in-law’s house to find a dead woman’s diary that might tell us who killed her. This was my life now. A coven, a ghost, a detective who brought me coffee, and a murder that wouldn’t stay buried.
I went to bed and didn’t dream, which was the kindest thing my brain had done for me in weeks.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“We’re really goingto break into my ex mother-in-law’s house,” I said, and the fact that this was the sanest sentence I’d spoken all week told me everything I needed to know about my life.
Saturday night. Seven-twenty. Four women in a Subaru parked two streets over from the Ferraro house, making sure the driveway was empty and no one was inside.
Lori was behind the wheel with the engine off and her reading glasses on, looking like someone’s grandmother waiting outside a piano recital. Tammy was in the passenger seat with a thermos of coffee and her phone set to the neighborhood watch app, monitoring for activity. Jill and I were in the back seat, and Jill was doing that thing where she breathed in patterns—four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out—that her therapist had taught her for panic attacks.
“I prosecuted people for this,” she said. “Literally. I stood in front of juries and said ‘the defendant knowingly entered a dwelling without authorization’ and now I’m?—”
“Jill.”
“Right. Breathing.”
We walked to the house through the side yard. No streetlights on this stretch—the neighborhood was the kind of wealthy that preferred tasteful darkness to visible security. Jill and I reached the side door that led into the mudroom, the one the family used when they didn’t want to bother with the front entrance. I’d come through this door ten thousand times carrying groceries, hauling kids’ sports equipment, sneaking in late from the one book club meeting Sal hadn’t wanted me to attend.
Now I was sneaking in to steal a dead woman’s diary. Life comes at you.
“Can you do the lock?” I whispered.
Jill extended her hand toward the deadbolt. Her fingers trembled. She closed her eyes, did the breathing thing, and I felt it—a shift in the air, subtle, like a change in pressure before a storm. Something clicked inside the door. Then clicked again. Jill’s face contorted.
“It’s a double lock. There’s a—hold on?—”
A third click. The handle turned. The door swung open, and Jill’s hands dropped to her sides, shaking.
“I need to sit down,” she whispered.
“You can sit down after. Come on.”
The house was dark and silent. Just the hum of a refrigerator, and the tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer that Rosaria had picked out and everyone hated.
Rosaria materialized in the hallway mirror as I passed it. She looked strange here, in her own house. Diminished somehow, like the walls remembered her differently than she remembered herself.
