---

Sixteen-year-old Emma was standing in the back of the hall, in a black and beige dress that inverted like a tulip, her long red hair shining under the amber lights. She stood next to Gretchen, who was dressed in a pantsuit, and Maggie, who was wearing a lacy pink and black dress that stopped at the knee. Jenny was sitting in the corner, absorbed in a novel, as usual, while the rest of them were all watching Jason Thorpe spike the punch from the bottles he’d filched from his parents’ liquor cabinet, which were hidden in a sports bag at his feet.

The town hall had been transformed for the annual winter dance. This year’s theme was Enchanted Forest.

Sculpted willow trees created a canopy overhead that had been covered with fairy lights and fake snow.

Emma’s eyes scanned the room and, with a little jolt in her chest, she saw Jack staring back at her from across the dance floor. He was standing next to Stella Lea, who was dressed in a pale blue dress that seemed at odds with her sour expression. He gave her a small smile, and she looked away with a flush.

A slow song came on, and a geeky boy with dark hair who lived in the next village, and was wearing a Superman T-shirt with his formal trousers, came over to ask her to dance.

Emma agreed, despite Gretchen and Maggie’s sniggers; she didn’t quite know how to say no politely. When the song finished, she felt someone touch her shoulder. It was Jack.

‘Let’s go outside,’ he said.

She blinked, surprised, but nodded.

It was freezing outside; she’d left her coat in the hall. He shrugged out of his jacket and gave it to her.

‘Who was that?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘No idea, he just asked me to dance.’

‘So you said yes?’

She grinned at him, and then looked away. They were walking down the cobbled path towards the Brimbles’ store, now closed for the evening. Just the shadowy moon lit their path.

‘Why? Were you jealous?’

He stopped, his face serious. ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

She looked up at him from beneath her lashes. ‘Good.’

Before she knew it, he was leaning over and kissing her. His lips were warm, his breath scented slightly with rum. Her head started to spin and her heart to thrum. She’d waited for so long for this moment.

It was her first ever kiss, and when they finally tore apart to breathe, she thought she might never be this happy ever again.

His breath was warm on her neck. ‘So, that’s what it’s like to kiss Emma Halloway,’ he said with a grin.

She felt her stomach flip as she looked into his eyes. ‘Did you wonder about it?’

He grinned. ‘Always.’

Suddenly a pair of strong hands wrenched her away from Jack. She gasped in horror as she saw Neil Allen, Jack’s father, standing across from them, a stony expression on his face. A face, she realised, that looked so very similar to Jack’s, only older, and far angrier than she’d ever seen Jack look.

‘Dad—’ Jack started, his eyes widening.

His father’s face grew harder still. ‘You’re drunk – I can smell it from here. At least that explains this stupidity. In front of the whole town too.’

Emma’s eyes widened. She could see Janet Allen marching towards them, her face livid. She left behind her Stella Lea, whose mouth, like that of many of her schoolmates, was hanging open at the sight of Jack Allen and Emma Halloway kissing in the moonlight.

‘I’m not drunk,’ protested Jack. ‘Dad, this is ridiculous, Emma and I are friends.’

‘Friends?’ said Mrs Allen, nearing, her eyes snapping to Emma’s, a look of pure loathing on her face, as if being friends with a Halloway was far worse than finding her son drinking. ‘I thought I told you to stay away from my son,’ she said, pushing Emma away from Jack.

‘Mam—’

Suddenly there were thunderous footsteps, and a cold voice behind hissed, ‘Touch my grandchild again, Janet Allen, and I’ll make whatever stupid curse you think we put on your family, seem like a joke,’ growled Evie, her voice low, and deadly.

There were several gasps all around.

Evie’s blue eyes were wide, her dark mantle of shaggy grey hair fairly snapping with electricity and, for just one heart-stopping moment, there wasn’t a person watching who didn’t wonder if the rumours about them were true. Even Emma.

‘Come,’ she said to her granddaughter.

Emma hesitated for just a moment, her eyes meeting Jack’s. How had what until then had been the most special night of her life turned into one of the worst?

---

‘I don’t care what you say!’ shouted Emma, later that night. ‘I love him.’

Dot’s eyes were anxious as she tried to intervene. ‘Evie—’

Evie shot her a silencing look. Dot and Aggie had come over quickly when they’d heard the news. Uncle Joe had made himself scarce in the living room, telling them to, ‘Go easy on the child.’

‘You love him?’ she repeated. ‘You’re sixteen, for goodness’ sake.’

‘So?’

‘So, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Evie, is that helpful—’ began Dot.

‘What?’ spluttered Evie, rounding on her sister, her eyes blazing.

‘Come on, love, it’s not like it’s a surprise – we’ve all known she’s felt this way for years,’ said Aggie with a sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose.

Emma looked at her aunt gratefully and dashed away a tear.

Evie sighed, her anger starting to ebb. When Janet Allen had touched Emma, she had looked as if she could have cheerfully murdered her, but suddenly, all the fight seemed to go out of her. ‘Oh lass, he’s an Allen, I just don’t want you to get hurt and I just don’t see how else this is going to end.’

Emma looked up. ‘B-but he feels the same way.’ She looked back down at her feet. ‘I’m sure he does.’

‘Maybe, lass, I’m just not sure that’s going to make such a difference.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you!’

‘No, actually I’d very much like to be wrong.’

Emma’s lip wobbled as she turned on her heel, marched upstairs and slammed the door, hoping to drown out Evie’s words with the sound of it shuddering closed.

---

When she saw Jack the next day, fear grabbed hold of her heart at the look on his face. It was like a wall had formed in the space between them.

‘I can’t see you any more.’

Emma felt like she’d been plunged into ice.

‘W-what?’ she breathed. ‘Jack, no – we can fight this – fight them!’

He shook his head, wouldn’t look her in the eye. ‘No, we can’t.’

She grabbed his arm. ‘Why – why won’t you even try?’

He looked up, the mask slipping from his face so that she could see the pain his words were costing him. ‘I just can’t, Emma. Maybe things would have been different if Evie hadn’t said what she said – it just made it so much worse, they’re so angry with me. It’s like I’ve betrayed them or something.’ He looked down and whispered, ‘They told me things, things I never knew… that I didn’t want to believe.’

A creeping sort of dread started clawing at her throat. ‘About what?’

‘What your family did to mine…’

Emma’s mouth fell open. ‘But Jack, that was a long time ago, and it’s all rubbish anyway.’

‘Yeah well, they lost everything they had on that “rubbish”. Their whole business. My dad said it took forever for my grandfather to rebuild it, and even now it’s not what it was – and it’s all thanks to what they did. God Emma, I know it’s not your fault but I just wish you hadn’t come from that family.’

---

It was three weeks after the dance. Emma, in the twilight garden, cast a furtive glance over her shoulder. There was soil trapped beneath her fingernails. Beneath the squashes, a new token had been planted. The necklace that had once belonged to her mother. Tears coursed down her face, but she was determined; she should have done this years ago. She didn’t have much time before Evie came home. Her fingers left dirt on the well-worn page, the book open to an old recipe called simply Faded Love, a recipe that promised to help a heart learn to forget. Though she had eaten every bite of the intricate dish, which had asked for artichoke hearts and fresh juniper berries, as the weeks passed she realised that it had made no difference at all; all she still felt was heartbroken.

She spent as much time as she could away from the cottage, walking the moors. It was a favourite walk, one where as a child she’d gather wild flowers and herbs; but now she was older, she spent more time, she supposed, gazing inward than out.

She liked to come here, so that she could be alone and think. Sometimes she’d imagine that she owned that old farmhouse, with its broken-down roof and faded blue shutters and doors. Sometimes, she imagined getting as far away from Whistling as she could, going back to London, and away from here where people judged you more on your last name than who you were inside.

It hadn’t been easy going back to school after the winter dance, all the stares, and the rumours. The constant whispering. Stella Lea had taken to calling her a witch again; she mostly just tried to ignore her, as usual. Maggie, Gretchen and Jenny tried their best to shield her from some of her schoolmates’ taunts, but they could offer no real solace for the fact that Jack wasn’t really speaking to her any more. It was this that hurt Emma more than anything else.

Leaving the wild and empty moors, she walked back towards the village, thinking she’d spend some time with Aggie in her studio.

As she walked into the village, her hands trailed over an old poster with a smiling cartoon drawing of a grain of wheat, announcing the harvest festival, now long since past. She saw Harrison Brimble, with his long grey hair and misty eyes, give her a little wave from his store. She passed the new pizza bar that had just opened, the scent of pepperoni and mozzarella cheese wafting thickly on the air, and she saw inside her friend Jenny, sitting next to her brother Ryan, laughing as they ate. Maggie said the owner didn’t check for IDs when serving alcohol, so it was rather popular with her peers. She wondered if she’d ever feel like a normal teenager again. When Jenny looked up, Emma averted her eyes; she didn’t want to have to go and say hello, and pretend to be happy. She headed up the street, past the old clock tower to Aggie’s flat, which was a converted old house of honey-coloured stone, the windows and doors painted in a pale mint green, the garden full of hollyhocks, roses and French lavender. She pressed the buzzer, and went upstairs when Aggie’s voice boomed through the speaker for her to ‘Come up, our lass.’

When she saw Emma’s face, her mouth pulled down. ‘Bad one, was it?’

That was Aggie, she just let you be. It was a comfort not having to pretend otherwise. Emma nodded, taking a chair by the window of Aggie’s studio, which had a view of the village square below and the clock tower. She could see people milling about doing their autumn shopping, baskets under arms.

Aggie poured them both a sherry. ‘Medicinal,’ she said with a wink.

Emma took it with a small smile. ‘I’m starting to understand why my mother ran away,’ she said glumly, as Aggie went back to painting an enormous, shadowy feather using swirling black paint.

Aggie dabbed her brush into her palette, and said, ‘Has Evie ever spoken to you about that?’

Emma shrugged. ‘Sort of, she just told me that my mother turned her back on Hope Cottage, and that the day she left, she said she was going to burn The Book.’ She sighed; even now, she could sympathise. ‘It’s funny, when I first came to live here, you and Dot said something about how hard it was to be a Halloway and a teenager.’

‘Yeah – well, it was hard, especially for your mam, I mean you have to deal with Stella, who is nasty enough, but she had Janet Allen in her year, can you imagine?’

Emma’s mouth fell open. ‘Janet Allen was in the same year as my mother?’

Aggie nodded. ‘Oh yes – though her last name was Cairn then. Not that it made a difference, she grew up in the Lea household.’

Emma’s eyes bulged. ‘She grew up with the Leas? How come?’

‘Adopted, apparently. The vicar’s best friend from Scotland passed away when Janet was about twelve. There was no other family really, I believe, so they took Janet and her brother Gordon in.’

Emma looked at Aggie in surprise. ‘Scotland?’

‘Aye, it’s how your mother met your dad – it was the year she turned twenty, Gordon’s old school friend, Liam McGrath, came to stay the one summer, and they met at some dance or something – and fell for one another.’

‘What!’ she exclaimed. ‘My mother met my father through Janet Allen?’

She sat thinking hard. She’d heard, from her Uncle Joe that her father had come to Whistling all those years ago to visit his friend, a friend who’d moved away now, but her uncle had never mentioned that he was the brother of Janet Allen.

‘Yes. Though from what I heard, Janet wasn’t too happy about it – she tried to split them up, and caused a real ruckus.’

Emma frowned. ‘But why? Why try splitting them up?’

‘Well, I suppose the real issue was that Janet despised your mother because she believed that Neil Allen – the boy she was in love with, Jack’s father – had a crush on her.’

Emma’s mouth fell open. ‘Did he?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think it was like you and Jack but I think it was part of the problem, and of course she was raised as a Lea so she also believed that your mother was a witch, you know? She didn’t want her brother’s best friend to end up with her so she tried to break them up, told him all about the family, all the worst sort of rumours – like that we were frauds and crooks. I believe, looking back, it was worse because your mother was pregnant at the time with Liam’s child, so she felt even more betrayed by Janet, who had always made her life a living hell at school.

‘When your mother told Neil about how Janet was trying to poison Liam against her, Neil took Janet’s side. I think he said something about your father having a right to know the sort of family he was signing up for. After that, Margaret just snapped, she tried to burn The Book, then she and Liam ran away, and from what you’ve told us, she just sort of gave up on being a Halloway, I guess.’

Emma looked down. It was the first time she’d ever really thought that, maybe, she was a little like her mother after all.