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He eventually texted to say he had made it home safely, but after that, he ignored nearly every call I made. The one time he finally picked up, he didn’t even bother with hello.

“Are you still in that house?”

“Of course I’m still here. I live here.”

There had been a long pause before he said, “Then until you cut every tie you got to that nigga Caspian—earthly, spiritual, paranormal, whatever the fuck category that situation falls under—me and you ain’t got nothing else to discuss.”

Then he hung up.

I had stared at my phone for several seconds before muttering, “Well, I guess we’ll never fuckin’ talk again.”

Because dead, alive, missing, haunting hallways, or whatever the hell else Caspian might have been doing, there was no universe where I could simply cut every tie to him.

We shared a child. Kaidence was basically Caspian compressed into a kindergarten-sized body, except mine wore Spider-Man pajamas, asked for snacks every forty-five minutes, and hadn’t yet developed his daddy’s habit of making grown men question their life choices. As long as my son existed, Caspian would always be connected to me, and if Yonas couldn’t deal with that after what happened at the mansion, then there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I still didn’t know what the hell Yonas had actually seen that night. I knew what he claimed to have seen, and after everything that had happened since we moved there, I couldn’t dismiss it as easily as I wanted to. The problem was that believing him opened a door in my mind that I wasn’t sure I was ready to walk through.

By the time I pulled into the mansion’s driveway, I was ready to get out of my scrubs, take a shower, check on Kaidence, and relax.

That had been the plan, anyway.

Then I walked through the front door.

“What the hell?”

The pictures she’d sent me did no justice for what I saw in person. They covered the foyer, crowded the area near the staircase, and lined the wall leading toward the formal living room. Several had already been opened, revealing black and silver decorations, fake spiderwebs, elaborate centerpieces, and enough artificial candles to start a damn church.

Willow stood in the middle of the chaos wearing leggings, a T-shirt, and a bonnet, with a clipboard in one hand and a box cutter in the other.

I stared at her. “Willow.”

She looked up as though there was absolutely nothing unusual happening around her. “Oh, hey, sis!”

I slowly surveyed the foyer again. “What is all this?”

“Decorations.”

“I can see that.”

“Then why you asking?”

I closed my eyes for a second because I had walked directly into that one. “Willow, you do know you’re throwing a Halloween party, not opening a damn haunted amusement park, right?”

She laughed. “Girl, please. This ain’t even half of it.”

My eyes widened. “Half?”

“Mhm.”

“Where’s the other half?”

“Coming tomorrow.”

I stared at her, then at the boxes, then back at her. “Willow, how much money have you spent on this party?”

Willow lowered her attention to the clipboard. “Enough.”

“Willow.”