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WILLOW SLIPPED INTO the library and closed the door behind her, exhaling into the silence. The room should have been a relief—cool, quiet, untouched by the party—but tonight, it felt like a gilded cage.

With a growl, Willow kicked the velvet sofa. She kicked it again, harder.

“Magic is real,” she muttered. “I don’t care what Ash says.”

A chuckle cut through the dark. Willow jumped, her heart leaping into her throat. From the sofa—the one she’d just attacked—Miriam Candler pushed herself upright, stretching her arms with deliberate ease.

“Is violence against furniture customary for young ladies these days?” she asked.

Willow stumbled backward, slapping at the wall until she found the light switch. A golden glow flooded the room, illuminating Miriam, who looked amused.

“How long have you been here?” Willow demanded. “Have you been sitting here the whole time?”

Miriam patted the cushion beside her. “I have. Won’t you join me?”

Willow crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re that folklorist lady who wanted to see my mom’s journals.”

Miriam’s gaze sharpened. “So she did keep journals. Can you show me where they are?”

“What? No! And... no again.” This lady was crazy if she thought Willow was going to go around pulling out all the family skeletons. “ You said she kept journals. Not me.”

Miriam gave a light shrug, the sort that said, Oh well, worth a try.

“Why are you still here?” Willow said.

Miriam regarded Willow thoughtfully. “I was hoping to talk to you, actually.”

“ Me ? No.”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

“So definitively, as if you know better than I do who I want to talk to.”

Willow huffed. “I’m Willow. The oldest sister. The one who didn’t go to college?”

Miriam’s expression remained the same.

“If you’re wanting to talk to someone, it’s probably Ash,” Willow said.

“I see. Did Ash go to college?”

“No, but . . . she will. Obviously.”

“And for that reason, I would want to talk to her?”

Willow laughed. She couldn’t help it. She felt terribly weary all of a sudden and dropped down next to Miriam. “Well, it’s not me you’re looking for. I promise you, there is nobody at this party who came here hoping to speak to me. I’m the crazy one, in case you didn’t know.”

“What a funny hill to die on,” Miriam mused. “Do you know the hearts and minds of all your parents’ guests?”

Willow felt flustered.

“Never mind,” Miriam said. “Tell me this, though. Why do you say you’re the crazy one?”

“I don’t. Other people do. Because... of things that happened.” Willow felt her cheeks grow hot. “Don’t worry about it.”

“ Are you crazy?”

“No! I mean—maybe. Not like that.” She hitched her shoulders. “Are you? My father said you believe in black magic.”

Miriam threw back her head and laughed. “Well, maybe I do—although I highly doubt Grant said anything of the sort. I collect stories about magic—black magic, white magic, all sorts of magic. But then, I collect stories about all sorts of things.”

She inclined her head toward the room’s closed door. “I sense that you have some stories of your own. We’re alone here, you and me. I would love to hear them.”

“Oh, sure. Because every famous folklorist is dying to hear the stories of a failed Atlanta debutante.”

“You were a debutante?”

“Well. No.”

“Then you’re no more a failed debutante than a failed heart surgeon,” Miriam said. “Unless you have a secret career I don’t know about?”

Willow dragged her thumbnail across her eyebrow, which itched. Then she lowered her hand and turned both palms upward to say, What do you want from me, strange lady?

Miriam smiled. “ I’ve made a career out of studying the places where the veil runs thin, and the energy you give off...” She shrugged. “It’s possible you could learn as much from me as I could from you. That’s all.”

“‘The veil’?” Willow echoed. “What do you mean, ‘the veil’?”

“The barrier between this world and the worlds that we’ve forgotten. Worlds that have forgotten us.”

Willow’s breath grew shallow, and her spine prickled, the way it did when the lights flickered in a storm. She blinked several times in a row, clenched her hands in her lap, and said, “I think you’re making fun of me.” She kept her voice as steady as she could. “And I don’t appreciate it.”

“I am not making fun of you, Willow. Far from it.” Miriam rubbed her own eyebrow with the knuckle of her index finger, and Willow had the absurd thought that her itching eyebrow had been contagious.

“I study the unseen doors that are woven into the fabric of reality,” Miriam said with a surprising lack of formality.

“I myself have never been fortunate enough to see one. But based on what I overheard”—she tilted her head at the door—“I suspect that perhaps you have. If so, I would very much like to hear about it.”

Willow didn’t know what game Miriam was playing. She felt suspicious... but also curious. She eyed Miriam and said nothing.

Miriam waited several beats, then said, “Your mother believes that her mother committed suicide when she was an infant. Is that correct?”

Willow drew back. Did Miriam mean, Your mother’s mother committed suicide, correct? Or did she mean, Your mother thinks her mother committed suicide, correct? Either way, how did she know—and why was it any of her business?

“Yes,” Willow said cautiously.

“Well, she didn’t,” Miriam said.

Now Willow was bewildered. “ Who didn’t? And what didn’t she do? I’m confused.”

Miriam’s expression softened. “I’m not the bad guy here, Willow.

” She patted Willow’s knee. “I’m not teasing you or trying to confuse you.

I’m not hoping to get anything from you.

” She tilted her hand from side to side.

“Well, that’s not true. I am, but what I’m hoping for isn’t much.

Information, that’s all. But it’s only fair that I begin. .. and so...”

“Yeees?” Willow said.

“Your mother’s mother. Your grandmother.”

“I know how lineage works.”

“Wrenna Bratton,” said Miriam, and Willow was overcome with the urgent and dreadful feeling of being a child and needing—desperately—to pee. She didn’t need to pee. It was a reflex, that was all, because no one in the Braselton family spoke that name aloud, ever.

Or rather, no one in the Braselton family spoke that name aloud more than once .

When people spoke of Wrenna Bratton, bad things tended to happen.

Also, it seemed very strange that Willow had only recently been thinking of Wrenna Bratton and the footstool and the vertiginous moment of no takesies-backsies.

A pendulum swung in Willow’s mind: a woman hanging, dangling, swaying from coarse rope. A baby—Willow’s mother—crying in a crib just feet away.

She took a shaky breath and searched Miriam’s face. “What about her?”

“As I said, your mother thinks she hanged herself. But she didn’t.”

Willow sucked in air, and her eyes went reflexively to the door of the library, just in case. But no one else was here. Just Willow and Miriam, speaking of a dead and dangling woman who, according to Miriam, might not have dangled after all.

Miriam leaned in. “Willow,” she said carefully, “it’s clear you don’t like talking about this.”

About what? About her dead grandmother, who had saddled her mother with a fear of abandonment so deeply rooted that she had yet to escape its clutches? Now, why in the world wouldn’t Willow like to talk about that?

“We don’t have to,” Miriam said, “if it’s too much.”

A rough laugh escaped from Willow because that was the excuse everyone trotted out when talking about her mother. Better not—it’ll be too much for your mother. Don’t say that in front of Mercy! She’ll take to bed for weeks.

“I can handle it,” she said. “I am not my mother.”

Miriam thought about this, then nodded and settled back into the cushioned sofa.

“I’d like to tell you a story, then. The story of your grandmother, Wrenna Bratton, which I’ve pieced together through conducting dozens and dozens of interviews.

Wrenna—and those like her—are of particular interest to me.

People who are said to have the Old Blood. Fae blood.”

Willow’s pulse quickened. She didn’t want to show it, didn’t want to give anything away, but Miriam had her full attention. “Fae?” she said. “As in... faerie?”

“It was said that Wrenna had a touch of fae blood. And if Wrenna did...” Miriam arched an eyebrow. “As you said, you know how lineage works.”

Willow felt dizzy.

“I’d like to tell you what I know,” Miriam proposed. “Shall I?”

“Yes, please,” said Willow.

So Miriam began.

“Wrenna was born in the North Carolina mountains, in a tiny town called Hemridge. Hemridge, it is said, was one of the last havens for the faeries who once lived peaceably among mortals. Faeries, the Fair Folk, the fae... they weren’t always our enemy, nor we theirs.

But we ran them out. We humans have an awful habit of messing things up. ”

Willow nodded mutely.

Miriam cocked her head. “Have you been to Hemridge, Willow?”

“No. Never.”

“It’s beautiful—and bountiful. The Smoky Mountains hold vast stretches of wilderness, even now.

” She nodded. “The fae knew how to join forces with the land rather than subdue it or battle against it, so the faeries who weren’t killed or captured escaped into the mountains and hid.

But hiding isn’t a permanent solution. Eventually, the day came when the last faerie of all, a girl not much younger than you, was forced out by the threat of death. ”

Miriam looked wistful, and Willow softened toward her just a little. It was as if Miriam grieved for this fae girl, the one who’d been the last of her kind. You didn’t grieve for someone you invented. Did that mean Miriam’s story might... be true?