Page 27 of A Lullaby for Witches

I pressed my lips tight, but didn’t say anything. The hallway was dark, the faint sound of Mother and Father finishing their dinner floated upstairs. Outside, the birds sang their last songs of the day.

“Margaret.” Henry’s eyes softened with pity. “My poor darling sister. I thought you too clever for this.”

I had thought myself clever, too, and so above the young women who came to my cabin in the night begging for the evidence of their transgressions to be erased. How foolish I must have looked to Henry. I had thought only of my pleasure, and my ache for a baby to call my own, and not the practical consequences of my actions. How could I have thought that the very same baby that would be my heart’s love would not also be my downfall? There was a reason why after weeks of Jack promising that he would sway his parents that he had hadn’t been round to ask my father’s permission. There was a reason why he had not come for me to elope. All the love potions and spells and prayers couldn’t save me. Oh, how could I have let myself fall in love!

Before I knew what was happening, I found myself folded into Henry’s arms, my tears staining the rough wool of his coat.

“Oh, my dear sister. My own dear love.” His chin tucked over my head, just as Jack had held me. We did not move for a long, long time.

Perhaps if it had been George holding me in his arms in the dark hallway, I would have been able to unburden my hopes and fears to my favorite brother. But it was Henry, not George, so I held the deepest of my thoughts to myself.

He saw me tucked into bed, making certain that I had water and fresh linens. It felt good to be taken care of, to have my burdens eased just the smallest bit, even by Henry. For all that Jack worshipped me, he was not there when I needed him, did not seem to exist outside of our stolen nights in the woods. Henry was here, though, sitting beside my bed, dabbing at my clammy temples with a cloth until the worst of the nausea passed.

“Poor darling,” he crooned.

In the dark, with his hand reassuringly in mine, it was easy to forget the reason for our confrontation in the hall. “Henry,” I whispered, though there was no one that might overhear us, “may I ask you something?”

“Of course, anything.”

Though I didn’t know exactly what it was I was asking, I felt my way as I went. Phebe’s words about my family tickled the back of my mind. “Is there something about our family—something about me—that I don’t know?”

It wasn’t my imagination; Henry went very still, and I could hear his slow swallow. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what I mean exactly, but I think you do.”

Abruptly, he dropped my hand and stood up. “You should sleep,” he told me, brushing a kiss against my brow. “You’re overwrought and need rest.”

Before I had a chance to protest, he had shut the door, leaving me with my festering doubts.

15

Augusta

Augusta’s childhood home sat on a quiet side street in a diverse neighborhood of working-and middle-class families. It was only a fifteen-minute drive from her old place with Chris, but it felt like another world. At least four bathtub Marys welcomed her back with outstretched arms, and American flags and seasonal banners fluttered from porches. Pulling up in front of the two-family house with light blue vinyl siding and neatly swept patio, Augusta turned the ignition off and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, her resolve faltering.

At least getting out of the apartment hadn’t been too bad. Chris had never returned after their fight, and Doug had been holed up in his room and hadn’t come out to say goodbye. There had been no awkward conversations, no chances to second-guess herself. It was better that way. A clean break, a fresh start.

Except that her fresh start included moving back to her childhood home with her mother and facing all the ghosts that still lingered there. After her dad had died, she’d been desperate for a change of scenery, but her mom had insisted on staying in their family home. The real estate developers would just love for her to move out, her mother would always say, but they would have to pry her dead body out of her reclining chair before she gave them the satisfaction of turning the house into luxury condos for yuppies.

As if on cue, her mother threw open the screen door. “There’s my girl!” She was wearing house slippers, but padded out to the sidewalk to meet Augusta and pulled her into a tight embrace. Holding her at arm’s length, her mother studied her. “Look at you! Have you lost weight?”

“Um. Maybe.”

“I hope you’re hungry because Ginny from next door brought over a Tupperware of sauce and I’m making meatballs.” Her mother grabbed a suitcase and started carrying it inside.

“I’m vegetarian, Mom,” Augusta said, hurrying to catch up.

“No wonder you’re so thin. Well, I have some chicken breasts in the freezer. You’ll eat chicken, won’t you?”

Augusta followed her mother down the hall, half listening to her steady stream of chatter. The Podos house could have been a museum in its own right, a time capsule of family life from the 1980s to the 2020s. The hallway carpet was still faded and stained from the infamous Kool-Aid Spill of 2003. An unfinished needlepoint—on which her mother refused to admit defeat—was still propped up half-heartedly on the mantel. Maybe in two hundred years a harried tour guide would usher tourists through the living room, pointing out the robust collection of snow globes on the bookshelf and speculating about the people who had collected them.

“What about lemonade? Should I make some lemonade?” Her mother had already moved on from unloading the car to bustling around the kitchen. Her frenetic energy was always a lot for introverted Augusta. A pediatric nurse at one of the hospitals downtown, Pat Podos was tough as nails, and didn’t suffer fools lightly. She always wore shirts with slogans or puns when she wasn’t in her scrubs, and today’s said I CAN’T KEEP CALM—I’M ITALIAN!!!

She caught Augusta looking at it and grinned. “Isn’t that a riot? I got it at Savers.”

Augusta frowned. She’d never heard that saying before. “Are we Italian?”

Her mother waved her off. “Don’t they say everyone has a little Italian in them?”

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