I’m still so mad at him, but fascinated by him, too, in the way that I always have been and probably always will be—and we sit down at the scarred old table, and he drums his fingers on the table and then he begins, “So Blix was the one who was supposed to get my family’s mansion, the one that got passed down through the generations, oldest daughter to oldest daughter. But she got cut out of the will after what were probably high-level shenanigans, knowing my parents, and—well, whatever. My mom’s mom ended up with the house instead.”

After that start, he has to get up and pace around, and the story is like something from some Southern Gothic network TV miniseries. It all started back with robber barons and war heroes and wills and pistols at dawn—but basically the part that meant something was that Blix got cheated out of the family mansion, and Noah knows that his mother has always been squirrelly (his word) about Blix, maybe because she feels guilty for what they did. She was always proclaiming how, in her own defense, she took much better care of the house than Blix would have—and how she was so much more connected to the community, and had so many charitable causes.

But meanwhile Blix traveled around the world and then went off to Brooklyn, of course, and the family watched with consternation as she took up with all those alternative things: “magic and mayhem,” Wendy called it.

“She would never admit this, but I think she was kind of worried that Blix was going to do voodoo on her or something. Get the house back, or expose her. And so now that Blix has died—and this is strictly my theory—my mom is desperate to get Blix’s papers and find out what she was up to all those years. And if she has to, she’ll prove that Blix was never in her right mind, and therefore, for that to happen, you should be cut out of the will.”

“Speechless,” I say. “I am utterly speechless.”

“Yeah. It’s ugly. This is why I never wanted to have much to do with my parents. My dad wanted me to go into business, learn all the ropes of his firm—but nope. I picked teaching school. And going to Africa. And now I just want to do more of that. I’m scheduled to leave the country next week. Going to Bali this time.”

“To Bali? Aren’t you in school?”

He grins. “Actually . . . ah . . . that would be a no.”

“But you said that was why you wanted to stay here—” I see his face. “No? You were never taking classes?”

“No. I told you that so I could stay. I didn’t have anything else going, and besides, I kind of was intrigued by you. You know. You’re hot. Aaaand . . . well, my mom wanted me to keep an eye on what was going on here.”

“Wow.” I sit back in my chair. “Okay, so let me get this straight. So basically you’re dismantling this house to help your mom get it away from me, then? You have no stake in it.”

“Pretty much.” He ducks his head. “Sorry.”

“Well, then why don’t you stop? Why don’t you right now just this minute stop it?”

“I would. I really would. But you don’t know my mom. She’s relentless. She talks to me every day, getting more and more worked up.” He gives me a guilty little smile. “Also, I’ve already sent her a whole bunch of boxes of Blix’s stuff. Including—and I’m sorry about this, Marnie, I really am—I sent her that letter Blix wrote to you. And her book of spells.”

I think for a moment of telling him the truth, that those things are never, ever going to make it to Virginia. But I decide not to.

Noah is, among other things, an ex-husband. An opportunist. A havoc wreaker. A double agent. The best lover I’ve ever had. And I am so ready to be rid of him forever.

I decide right that minute that if he heads out to Bali, Wendy Spinnaker can always just wonder what exactly her aunt’s wacky career in magic consisted of, and why nothing ever turned up in those boxes. She can text him over and over again while he’s lying on the beach somewhere, and he can turn over on his towel, adjust his sunglasses, take another sip of his mai tai or whatever, and gaze out at the azure sky.

But he’ll never be able to tell her for sure what happened, because he’ll never know.

FORTY-FIVE

MARNIE

Blix’s nefarious magic career is still on my back patio. Just so you know.

Shall I put on the tinfoil hat and come down and tackle it?

Ahem. I believe, if you will check your popular culture references, tinfoil hats only protect you from electromagnetic waves and therefore cannot have any effect on magic spells.

Oh.

Still, if you have one, bring it. It might look cute.

Should I bring dinner? I bet Roy would like a chicken.

I’m making popovers. I’ve decided to be the Reigning Prince of Popovers.

A tinfoil crown is definitely in order then.

Oh, we are so clever, aren’t we? Tinfoil hats and well-punctuated text messages—that’s us. So funny and chaste and clever and innocent. And it is December second, and he is leaving on December fifteenth, and that will be that.

I sit at my table with aluminum foil and a pair of scissors and a cardboard cutout of a crown. What am I doing? Why, making him a crown, of course. To make him smile. To keep up the joke, to make one of our last evenings together fun and companionable.

So he’ll think as he’s driving cross-country: Yes, we had such fun, she and I.

Fun, fun, fun.

I slam the scissors down on the table and stand up. Oh my God. I want him. I want to unwrap him, press my head against his chest. I want his mouth grazing my nipple. I want to be in his bed with him again, but I want to be on top of him. I want him to kiss me and not look at me like I’m some kind of monster that he can’t give in to.

I want Patrick. I want him, I want him, I want him, I want him.

I look around the kitchen. The sky is darkening outside already, the lights of the skyline shining against the thick gray clouds of night. I walk around the room, my arms folded tight across my chest, my heart beating so fast.

I want him.

When I squint, I see them. The sparkles.

Oh my goodness, I see the sparkles again. They’re back.

If I had the spell book from his patio, maybe I could figure out if there’s a little bit of magic that might work on him. On us, before the time runs out.

Then I remember something. The first night I met her, she gave me a scarf when I was leaving. And it’s hanging in the closet. I saw it the other day when I was looking at everything. Somehow it’s always seemed too fancy for me.

Like it would have been cheating to wear Blix’s essence around my neck that way. But now tonight, we need the big guns.

It goes all wrong from the moment I get there. I’m too shy or too forward or too tense. I forget to bring the chicken, and when I offer to go get one at Paco’s, Patrick says not to bother. And I’m wearing a dress, which I see is ridiculous, because you can’t unpack boxes in a dress—you can’t search through magical artifacts when you’re dressed like you wanted to be out at dinner or at a movie instead.

And why did you do it? Because you wanted to look beautiful.

I’m wearing the best thing in my closet, the black-striped dress with the leggings. The dress that shows a bit of cleavage. Patrick might appreciate the cleavage, and he could peel off the leggings—that’s what I was thinking, Your Honor. I plead guilty to lustful thoughts while getting dressed.

But now I am here, and there is no chicken, and the popovers are just popovers—flour and milk and eggs and air. And he is in a mood—too jokey, too something. Brittle, somehow. Guarded.

I tell him about Noah and the story of Blix being in line to inherit the family mansion but then having it stolen from her, and I make it all dramatic—too dramatic—and he asks questions I can’t answer. And I’m acting all flustered and he looks at me funny, and it’s probably written all over my face: Dude, I want you.

But we can’t. He won’t.

We sit on the floor and go through the boxes, and there’s really nothing to it. The book of spells is at the bottom of a box that contains Blix’s muumuus and caftans, the dress she wore to my wedding, some fabulous scarves and coats. I take out the book and open it, and I say, “Look at all this magic! It makes me feel like she’s right here when I see it.”

He suddenly gets up and goes over to the sink and starts washing dishes.

“What’s wrong?” I say.

“Nothing.”

“Is it the Blix stuff?”

He hesitates, bites his lip. Puts a cup in the dish drainer. “It’s the anniversary of the fire.”

“Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, I’m not fit for company. I’m sorry. I should be by myself.”

I go over to the sink and I reach over and touch him, and to my surprise, he doesn’t pull away. I touch his arm and then his hand, where the scars are. I take his hand out of the soapy water. Slowly I run my finger along a ridge of scar tissue. He lets me.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” I say. “You couldn’t have changed it.”

When he speaks, his voice is ragged, and he pulls his arm away from me. “Yeah, well. If it hadn’t been for those ten seconds . . . do you see that if somehow those ten seconds didn’t happen, everything would have been different? Ten seconds, and the world doesn’t have any oxygen left for me. It’s like the color blue is missing or something, everything good drained away. I can’t—I don’t feel anything.”

“Oh, Patrick.”

“My life—you really don’t know me. You don’t see that my life is a before and after, and that I have to live in the shadows.”