Page 78 of Summer of Salt

“You’re leaving me for nine months. You think I’m not going to make you a little protection spell?” she responded. We sat on my bed, facing each other.

“Mary came to see me last night.”

“Me too,” she said.

“She was a human.”

My mom nodded. “She’s not leaving.”

“She told me.”

“But I’m glad you are,” Mom continued. “If it was going to be anyone...”

“Am I really the first? Out of all the Fernweh women?”

Mom nodded again.

Then: “You’ll be great, Georgina. You’ve always been great. Since the minute you were born, sending floods afteryour enemies.” She stared off into space, as if savoring the memory: her and Aggie and my sister and me in a wooden rowboat, making our way safely home.

Without my dad.

I couldn’t imagine leaving her.

I couldn’t imagine leaving this place.

And yet.

I went to say good-bye to Annabella.

My mother had made her a new grave marker. A flat little rock worn smooth from the ocean. Magically engraved words read:We loved with a love that was more than love.

And I thought—

In a million years, if some archaeologists unearthed the remains of By-the-Sea from the bottom of the seafloor (an Atlantis for a distant generation!), and found this rock with these words guarding these tiny, fragile bird bones, they would have no fucking idea what to make of us.

And that was fine with me.

With Aggie and Harrison’s help, I loaded my three steamer trunks and one picnic basket into the bed of my mother’s pickup. Harrison and Prue added their luggage, and I remembered, so vividly, the moment they’d gotten out of Seymore Stanners’s taxi in the driveway of the inn, two months and an entire lifetime ago.

There’s one for both of us, my sister had said.

But I’d promised myself I wouldn’t cry (mostly because I really didn’t want it to rain on all my stuff), and so I pushed that memory down somewhere to save until later.

“Are you okay?” Prue asked me.

“I’m okay,” I said, and kissed her.

We lay down in the truck’s bed as my mother drove us to the docks, watching the whitest, puffiest clouds crash against each other in the sky over what had been my entire world, whatwouldbe my entire world, at least for the next thirty minutes.

I closed my eyes and let the roar of the wind rush over me, drowning out as much as I could.

Everything would be okay.

The birdheads would come back.

The inn would stay open.

My sister was alive, and Peter was in jail.