Page 29 of A Lullaby for Witches

Augusta forced a smile, which she was sure looked as fake as it felt. Leo was probably the last person in the world she should confide in, yet she was desperate to talk to someone. She had no close female friends anymore, and she was way too mortified to talk to her mother. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just been a weird week.”

She could feel Leo glancing at her before merging onto the highway. “Want to talk about it?”

Shrugging, she pretended to be absorbed in peeling a sticker off her water bottle. “My boyfriend and I broke up. It was a long time coming, but it’s been rough all the same.”

Again, the sensation of Leo’s gaze flitting to her. “Oh, yeah?” His voice held an undeniable note of interest.

“Yeah,” she confirmed.

“Sorry, that came out wrong. I’m really sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks,” she mumbled into her water.

“If you want to talk about it, I’m a good listener,” he said, flashing that lethally disarming smile of his.

Augusta hesitated. Was he offering because he legitimately wanted to help? Or was he just hoping for a juicy story? But there was something about him that made her think he was in earnest, that he actually cared. “There’s nothing really to tell. We weren’t right for each other and things finally came to a head.”

“So it was mutual?”

“Um.” Since the breakup, Chris had sent her several texts. They’d ranged from pleading to angry, and eventually she began deleting all of them without reading. “He wasn’t completely on board with the idea.”

“Either way, that must have been hard, for both of you.”

The highway whizzed past them, and Augusta chewed on her lip, replaying in her mind the absurdly horrifying moment when Chris had dropped to his knees and asked her to marry him. “He proposed to me,” she blurted out before she could stop herself. “He said he’d been planning on asking me to marry him when I broke up with him.”

She could feel Leo digest this, studying her from the corner of his eye while he drove. “That kind of sounds like coincidental timing. Had you guys talked about marriage?”

“I think he just said that to make me feel guilty. I don’t think he really wanted to get married.”

“Did he do that a lot? Try to make you feel guilty?”

Augusta shrugged. “I’m kind of a guilty-by-default person,” she said. “I always thought the fights were all my fault. Anytime something was wrong, I blamed myself.”

There was silence for a beat, and she wondered if she was getting too personal too fast. But then Leo spoke. “I know I don’t know you that well, but you don’t strike me as someone who has a lot to feel guilty about. You seem like someone who tries really hard and goes out of her way to make people feel comfortable. I’m sure some people take that as license to shift blame away from themselves, but that’s on them, not you.”

Augusta blinked. Damn, hewasa good listener. And he was right—he didn’t know her, but his kindness was enough to bring tears to her eyes. She sniffed them back. “I just can’t believe I let myself be manipulated for so long,” she said with a groan. “I was so stupid.”

“Hey.” Leo leaned over and let his hand hover over her knee as if he was going to pat her leg. He must have thought better of it because to her disappointment, he placed it back on the wheel. “You’re not stupid, Augusta. He sounds like a manipulative bastard.”

Her first instinct was to defend Chris, the way she had for years every time someone rightly pointed out a red flag about him, but she didn’t owe him that anymore. “Yeah, he is,” she agreed. It felt good to finally say it.

“Do you have somewhere safe to stay?”

It took her a moment to realize what he was asking, and she almost laughed. Chris might have been overprotective and obstinate about some things, but he wasn’t violent. “I’m staying with my mom,” she said. “Until I can find a place of my own.”

“That’s good.”

She desperately wanted to ask if he was in a relationship himself, but there wasn’t a good way to say it without betraying that she was interested. Which, to be fair, she supposed she was.

As if reading her mind, Leo said, “My girlfriend and I broke up two years ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Did that mean he was single now? Two years was a long time—had he not dated since then? “Was it on good terms?” she asked cautiously.

His expression clouded. “It was complicated,” he said. “She passed away a few months after we broke up.”

“Oh, Leo. I’m so sorry.”

He gave a little shrug, and though it was a casual gesture, Augusta knew from personal experience how much emotion it probably held. “Like I said, it was complicated.”

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