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“You look terrible,” Bryony informed me the week before Christmas.

I leaned back against the folly’s half-built wall. A faint headache scrabbled at the back of my skull. “I feel terrible,” I admitted. “All this party planning is going to kill me.”

“It’s not like anyone but your family even comes,” Bryony said with a snort.

“You don’t understand how hard these people work to impress themselves,” I replied.

“You’re one of those people,” she reminded me, and I groaned. “At least it’s just Christmas.”

“No, it isn’t,” I told her. “It’s Christmas Eve and Christmas and Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve and a formal New Year’s Day brunch. Who does that? The whole point of New Year’s Day is to be asleep because you got trashed the night before.”

“Sure, miss never-had-alcohol-before-last-month,” Bryony teased me. “I bet you go to bed at nine on New Year’s Eve.”

“12:01 on the dot,” I countered. She laughed, her nose scrunching up. I could watch her laugh forever. I could stare at her until I memorized the constellations of her freckles, and I was well on my way to doing so. I wanted more than anything to lean forward and kiss her—

But I was a Vaughan, and she was the Harrow Witch, and she hadn’t kissed me, not really, and so I didn’t lean forward. Not even when she looked at me and bit her lower lip and shook her head a little like I’d done something to amuse her.

The next day, she flew out to St. Louis to spend Christmas with family, and mine started to arrive. Desmond was in Switzerland with his dad, but Celia proved a welcome distraction, attaching herself to me like a particularly chatty barnacle.

I floated through the parade of holidays. Christmas Eve: A string quartet playing, a sumptuous dinner, Mom and Simon and me drinking cocoa and singing off-key carols after bedtime. Christmas: lavish, impersonal presents stacked high. New Year’s Eve: thewhole house blazing with light to hold back the night for just long enough to ring in the new year before we all retreated to our rooms.

Almost all of us. As I got into bed just past one, I glimpsed a light heading off among the trees. Someone was out after dark.

It was New Year’s Day. I had been at Harrow for over three months. Nine left to go.

I fell asleep feeling as if it might not be so impossible. But after the holidays, my fatigue got worse. The headaches clustered together, leaving me in bed for days at a time, and I overheard worried conversations about my health every time people thought I was out of earshot. I kept waiting to get better, kept thinking the worst had to be over with, but every few hours of relief was followed by even worse symptoms. Eli made sure that I had regular doses of the remedy that had helped after that first migraine, when I’d gone wandering the halls, but it barely took the edge off.

By late January, I knew I couldn’t keep going like this. One day when the headaches had receded enough for me to think, I wobbled my way to Caleb’s office. I couldn’t afford not to talk about Harrow’s secrets, not now. My family had to know something that could help me.

Caleb had outfitted his office in sleek modern lines, with a glass desk and a top-of-the-line laptop. When I knocked on the door, he looked up from the email he was writing, peering over the top of his reading glasses.

“I’ve never seen you with glasses before,” I said as I entered.

He grimaced and took them off. “Old age. It catches up with very nearly all of us,” he said. “What can I do for you, Helen?”

I walked carefully over to his desk, wishing there was a place to sit. Moving too fast made me queasy these days—like I was constantly in the minutes before a full-blown migraine. “I’m getting sick,” I said plainly.

He didn’t answer at first. He tapped his thumb on the desktop in a steady rhythm. “Yes,” he said at last. He stood and stepped around the desk. He fetched a chair from against the wall and ushered me into it, then leaned against the desk, arms folded.

I sank into the cushioned seat, feeling as if I could keep sinking all the way into the floor. “It’s Harrow, isn’t it? The house is rejecting me. Or the Other is.”

His lips parted slightly in surprise. “You know about the Other.” He sounded disturbed by this revelation.

I huffed. “I’ve been here for months. You didn’t think I’d use that time to find out what was going on?”

Caleb rubbed a hand over his beard. “I wish you didn’t have to know about any of it. I wish none of these rules were necessary.”

“But they are. Because the Other has to be contained. Isn’t that right?” I asked.

He looked at me for a beat, his jaw tense. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “I suppose there’s no point in trying to hide it from you anymore if you already know that much. So, yes, as I understand it, that’s true,” he said.

He got up from his chair and came around the desk slowly. He leaned against the desk, crossing his arms. When he spoke again, his tone was confessional. “I’m playing a bit of catch-up too, you know. My father—well, to put it frankly, he never liked me. Ididn’t want any part of Harrow, much less to be master of it. And he didn’t want me to be either.”

Caleb fiddled absently with a heavy silver ring on his finger. I recognized the crest of Atwood School stamped on it—a class ring. “None of which is your problem. I only mean to say that I wasn’t raised to be Master of Harrow, which means that it wasn’t all that long ago I learned about the Other. Iris and Eli only know what they’ve gleaned over the years. We’re all sort of...”

“Flailing?” I supplied.

He grunted. “More or less,” he said. “You’re our hope, Helen. If you can make it to the Investiture and claim Harrow, Eli believes that you will have access to some kind of knowledge. And the ability to keep the Other a bit, well, calmer.”