Page 60 of The Witch They Fear

"Anything. Doesn't have to be big."

I'm quiet for a while. Watching the white lines on the road disappear under the car. The memory doesn't come all at once. It comes in pieces—a smell first, then a texture, then a shape. Like pulling a photograph out of water and watching it dry.

"There was this... thing I used to do. When I was little. Maybe eight or nine." I scratch my jaw. Casual. Like it doesn't matter. "I'd take a pillow and a blanket and my mom's flashlight and set up camp under the kitchen table. Just... read down there. For hours. Until somebody made me come out for dinner."

Nellie doesn't say anything. Just listens. The road hums under us.

"My sister—Lila—" The name sticks in my throat for a second. I swallow past it. "She was younger. She couldn't read yet. But she'd crawl under there with me and grab one of her picture books and sit right next to me. Shoulder to shoulder." I almost smile. Almost. "She had this whole system where she'd wait for me to turn a page and then she'd turn hers at the exact same time. So we were synchronized. Like we were reading the same book." I shake my head. "She wasn't. She was looking at drawings of a caterpillar. But she took it very seriously."

The car is quiet. The accordion has faded into something slower. Sadder.

"Gosh, I haven’t thought about that in so long," I say. "That table. The two of us under there with our books, turning pages together. It’s like she crawled under there because she wanted to be close to me. Wanted to be just like her big sister."

My voice doesn't crack. But it thins. Goes quiet at the edges.

"That's beautiful," Nellie says. Soft.

"Yeah." I look out the window. The oaks are just silhouettes now, black against a bruised purple sky. "It was."

We drive in silence for a while after that. I sit with the choking, stomach wrenching reality of what happened to Lila. What I did to her.

The future I robbed from her.

A lump grows in my throat and I try to clear it, but it won’t budge.

The highway narrows. The oaks crowd in. Signs for Thibodaux start appearing—hand-painted, half-obscured by Spanish moss. Nellie takes an exit and the road goes from highway to two-lane to gravel in the space of three turns.

The Aston Martin behind us looking ridiculous in the soft cloud of dust we kick up behind us.

Thibodaux announces itself in stages—a gas station, a church with a lit marquee, then the sudden compression of a small town pulling itself together around a main street. Friday night and the place is waking up. String lights are looped between the lamp posts. A bar on the corner has its doors open, music and laughter spilling onto the sidewalk. A couple walks a dog past a hardware store. Kids on bikes weave between parked trucks. The bayou is close—I can smell it, the wet green breath of it drifting between the buildings—but this is a town with a pulse, small and warm and doing its best to have a good time on a Friday.

Nellie parks on the main drag, in front of a narrow shotgun-style building wedged between a barbershop and a place that sells boudin and cold beer. A hand-painted sign above the door reads Marchand's Books & Botanicals. Herbs hang from the porch ceiling in dried bundles. The windows are cluttered with crystals and old book spines and a neon OPEN sign that flickers between pink and orange. Wind chimes made from what looks like old skeleton keys tinkle in the evening breeze. The front garden—if you can call it that—is barely contained, bushes and flowering vines spilling over their beds and onto the sidewalk, everything green and overgrown and humming with a magic I can feel from the car. A couple passing on the sidewalk step around the vines without looking down, the way you'd step around something that's always been there.

This place is… I can’t wait to go inside.

My magic reaches for it. The ambient frequency of a witch's home, decades of power soaked into the soil and the wood and the air itself. It's like the apothecary garden at Devenir but wilder, warmer, less curated. This magic hasn't been pruned by an institution.

It grew up feral and nobody told it to stop.

Nellie kills the engine. Behind us, the Aston Martin slides into a spot across the street—absurdly out of place between a mud-splattered pickup and a minivan with a Saints bumper sticker.

"Ready?" Nellie asks.

"Your mom doesn't know I'm coming."

"Correct."

"And you don't think the vampire parking his sports car in front of her shop is going to alarm her?"

"Oh, it'll definitely alarm her. But in a fun way." Nellie grins. "Come on."

The shop door has a bell. It rings—not a normal bell sound but a clear, musical chime that I feel in my sternum, like a tiny ward checking who just walked in. The interior is exactly what the exterior promised: shelves crammed with books and bottles, baskets of dried herbs hanging from ceiling hooks, a glass counter displaying crystals and amulets and things I can't identify yet. The air smells like sage and old paper and something sweet baking in the back. A cat—orange, enormous, unimpressed—is draped across a stack of encyclopedias near the register.

"Mama!" Nellie calls.

A crash from the back room. Then footsteps—quick, uneven, the sound of someone dropping what they were doing mid-doing-it. A woman appears in the doorway behind the counter and I see Nellie in thirty years: same curly dark hair, except threaded with silver and pulled up in a headwrap the color of marigolds. Same brown skin, same sharp eyes, same mouth that looks like it's always two seconds from either laughing or lecturing. She's wearing a flour-dusted apron over a long skirt and she has reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and she looks at Nellie and her entire face breaks open with joy.

"Bébé!"