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“Well,” Branwen said, returning to her tea. “Maybe that’s a better way to look at it than mine.”

The kitchen counters were cluttered with herbs and cooking utensils and freshly harvested produce. She covered a baking dish in foil, then slid it into the fridge.

“We’ll eat lunch later, and then we’ll plant that tree,” she said. “But there’s something we need to do first.”

She took a small, ornately decorated canister from a bookshelf. It looked as old as the house.

“Damian, drive us to the beach. We’ll need Clemency’s journal.”

Puzzled, I pulled it from my backpack and we followed her out the door.

Branwen’s cottage was no more than a twenty-minute drive to Moonstone Beach. We pulled into the exact spot we’d parked the first time Damian had kissed me, and the memory spread through me like warmth.

At the shoreline, the wind blowing through her long silver hair, Branwen pulled the canister from her leather satchel.

“Clemency’s ashes. She didn’t want them scattered until Verzeal was destroyed,” she said. “Marlowe, I need you to read the ledger of names once more.”

I opened the journal. We’d freed ourselves. The living. But no one had saved them. They’d lived on as ink on paper, waiting for someone to crack the spine and end the legacy.

“Now we read the ledger for its own sake, not to win the war. Today there’s nothing that we need from them. Today we simply grieve them.”

For the third and final time, I read each name from the ledger. The names were familiar now: Mary C., whose teeth had fallen out like rusted nails from a fence post. Emily P., who’d fractured her brittle wrist unscrewing a jar. Lily A., who’d woken every night to the sensation that she was being strangled by eels and died of pneumonia at twenty-three.

Damian listened, his body rigid. He’d never heard the names recited. Branwen stood stoic, staring at some fixed point on the horizon.

It was different in daylight. Yesterday I’d read them like rounds pressed into a chamber, spoken fast, under the clock, the tide gaining on us. Now I gave each name its full weight, and somewhere on the second page, they stopped being lines of ink that Foxgrave women kept dry through a century of fog, and they became faces. It was as though each one had made herself known to me, right before she dissolved to be at rest for good.

I read the last name and closed the journal.

Then Damian spoke, and my chest tightened and my breathing went shallow.

“Evelyn, who talked to her car like a horse and patted the dashboard on steep hills to encourage it,” he began, not from a book, but from memory. “Jessica, who could name every bird by its song. Layla, who salted her watermelon. Violet, who kept a list of words she loved. ‘Petrichor’ was her favorite. Isla, who danced while she cooked. Zoe, who laughed before the joke landed, because she trusted you to get there. Scarlett, who read the last page of every book first. Wren, who taught me that I could fight.”

I crossed my arms to stop my hands from shaking.

But there were more, the ones he’d watched Kai and Adrian and Soren and every other coven man lure back to the water. “Tanya, who always ordered two desserts and gave one away,” he continued, until he’d spoken every name he knew of.

The three of us stood there while the surf chased our feet.

When he finished, his posture changed. The debt he carried hadn’t disappeared, but today he spoke those names as women instead of evidence against himself.

When I closed my eyes to be in nothing but the salt spray and the wind and the hush and crash of the tide, it seemed as though the ocean itself had somehow released a breath. When I opened my eyes, Branwen was unscrewing the canister.

“Clemency Hart, daughter of no master,” she said. “Keeper of the severing, first of the line I serve.” She scattered the ashes into the water. “The work is done. The water’s clean. You’re relieved.”

She put the canister back in her pocket. “Right, let’s go plant that tree.”

We left the ocean to throw itself at the sand.

“Right here,” Branwen said, pointing to a spot on her property close to the treeline. Damian grabbed her shovel from the shed, dug a hole, and lowered the tree into the ground.

“Now your real life can begin, Damian,” she said, but she glanced at the two of us.

Inside, she busied herself at the counter while I unpacked the backpack. Damian laid the table. We ate homemade sourdough that ruined me for all other bread, jelly made from the blackberries in the garden, and a savory pie that nourished me at an atomic level.

“It’s Clemency’s recipe,” Branwen said, dishing a second helping of the pie onto my plate before I could protest. “She started the garden. I’m tilling the same soil,” she chuckled.

We gave her a recount of the night before piece by piece from our alternating perspectives, the drama unfolding between the tearing of bread and sips of lemonade.