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Hiding her magic was tricky enough for Temperance Molland, without having to wake up every morning and see a great big hooked nose. Warts and all.

If Temperance didn’t already know that her family’s powers were less about casting magic and more about receiving and interpreting it, she would think her mum had somehow charmed that sign to creak when it did.

Her own little oak alarm clock.

Living next to a pub meant sleep was hard to come by on big, boozy Saturday nights – the least the old girl could do was let Temperance have a lie-in.

Not that Temperance herself had been out on a massive bender night before.

Or for quite a few months, when it came down to it.

The kind of hangover she was suffering with this morning was more of an emotional one, caused by a very crappy evening with a very crappy date.

There’d been so many flirty messages, so much potential .

. . But now, only sour disappointment rolled around the lining of her stomach.

Temperance put her pillow over her face and let out a rage-induced scream.

‘Is that you up?’ her younger sister called across the landing.

Susie nudged the bedroom door open with her bum, dislodging some flaky sky-blue paint from its surface.

She was holding two mugs and blowing her droopy, red fringe out of her eyes.

‘Look: it’s your darling sister – some would say personal maid – bringing you a hot cup of tea first thing in the morning! ’

‘Hmmm.’ Temperance took the mug and her fingertips danced on the ceramic surface as the heat reached out to meet her skin. ‘I know what this is.’

Susie fluttered her almost translucent lashes. ‘ What ?’

In some ways, Temperance and Susie were as half as half-sisters could be: Temperance with her dark hair, olive skin and a tendency to overthink and overreact, all of which meant she stuck out like a sore thumb in their tiny Devon village.

Whereas Susie was pale skinned, found it easy to charm anyone into laughter and could enter and leave a room without causing even a hint of a fuss.

Like one of the Devon fairy folk, but at five feet eight inches.

Despite their differences, there was so much more that united the Molland sisters: their love of vintage fashion, their kindness and compassion, their limitless appetite for doughnuts, that they would fight for the other to the death, and their deep sense of belonging in East Prawle – just like The Witch’s Nose, they were pretty much a part of the landscape .

‘You want to distract me with tea so you can get a read on my clothes from last night. Admit it.’

Susie feigned shock. ‘Me? Never!’ She laid down her mug on top of Temperance’s most recent paperback and slipped her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. ‘But seeing as we’re on the subject . . .’

Temperance let out a long sigh. ‘Go on then. On the chair.’ Temperance nodded at where she’d slung her deep green velvet wrap top the night before.

Susie barely drew breath before lunging towards it, holding out her hand. Temperance watched as one velvet sleeve rose into the air to meet Susie’s touch. ‘Suse!’

‘What? You’re literally the only person I’m allowed to do that in front of! What is the point of a power if you keep it switched off all the time? It’s like Blackpool Illuminations left unplugged.’

Half-sisters they may be, but Temperance and Susie had both fully inherited their mother’s gift; the gift of the Molland line.

They were intrinsically attuned to the deeper energies of the world, energies most people didn’t realise were swirling about them every day.

Just like all matter exists as atoms – atoms that break down and reform, time and again – all emotions are made up of energy that doesn’t just evaporate once a feeling has been felt.

An emotion radiates from a person and it can either slip back into the big invisible network of living energy, or it can accidentally cling to something nearby, a memory of its former self.

The Molland women could read the emotions, the memories that clung onto fabrics.

None of them knew exactly why clothes had this property: maybe it was the weave of their fibres that held feelings close, maybe it was the body heat that gave them extra life, or maybe it was because clothes are like a second skin, like our armour to the outside world and always closest to our hearts.

But it seemed to the Molland women that the clothes you wore were almost like a butterfly net, gently scooping up the fluttering, beating, delicate feelings of a soul.

It was their job to set those butterflies free again.

If someone was overwhelmed by a huge feeling, that emotion would live on in the clothes they’d been wearing.

Temperance could pick up a donated wedding dress and tell you if the bride had serious doubts on the morning of her big day.

Susie could root through a donation box and pick out the polka dot skirt that had been worn to an excellent karaoke night, next to the silk Bond Street tie that someone had worn snuggly around their neck when they lost a job.

Nobody was quite sure how far back through the generations this gift went, their mum not really being on great speaking terms with her own parents, but it only ever presented itself in the women.

The memories remained vivid and overpowering even years or decades later, almost as if the previous owner had spilt a whole bottle of their signature scent on the garment before donating it to Try Again, their vintage clothing store.

And because these emotions were their own form of energy, and the Molland women were like lightning rods to receive them, it was as if there was something in the very fibres of fabrics that physically seemed drawn to Temperance and Susie.

With a little mental concentration, the sisters could pull a garment into their hands like a magnet lifting dressmakers’ pins.

No more than one at a time, and not all that far – it was hardly Luke Skywalker using the Force to shift an entire spaceship – but still, being able to lift an inanimate object half a foot into the air was an impressive feat.

Just one that they couldn’t show anyone else in the outside world.

The powers of being a witch came part and parcel with all the fears and worry of being judged as one, so the Mollands kept that party trick within their four walls.

Susie somewhat begrudgingly, as Temperance knew she’d been working on being able to tuck a napkin into her T-shirt with her hands held behind her back.

If given full reign, she’d be displaying that trick at the pub for all comers.

‘Lazy arse. Just grab it and get it over with,’ Temperance said, her voice flat.

Susie plonked herself down on the corner of the bed, the top spread out over her knees.

She closed her eyes, letting her fingers wave side to side over the velvet pile, turning it by increments, lighter then darker.

The familiar tingling sensation started in her fingertips, travelling to her palms as she opened herself up to the memories in the fabric.

Susie could see snatches of a misty scene in her mind’s eyes.

A pub table, two chairs.

The rest of the picture was blank.

A tall man, early thirties, sat opposite her. Carefully managed stubble. He’s talking, on and on, and soundbites pop through the mist:

‘You just think you don’t like wine: let me school your palette.’

‘But surely you don’t want to work in a second-hand shop all your life?’

‘Service here is shocking, you know. I’m not sure I will tip this time.’

The irritation and disappointment were so clear they were making Susie’s nose wrinkle.

Her eyes pinged open. ‘Oh, mate.’

Temperance slurped back some tea. ‘Right? I mean, am I Bill Murray? Is this Groundhog Day ? Because I am stuck forever in a loop of bad first dates.’

Susie’s delicate eyebrows dropped right down.

‘I can’t believe it. We vetted this guy like crazy!

I even scoured his Amazon wish list for red flags.

No fungal foot creams, a solid reading list. And secondhand?

! We’re talking the very finest vintage here!

’ Susie’s voice went into a high-pitched squeal and the pub sign creaked again as if in chorus.

‘Well, exactly. On paper he seemed . . . decent.’

Susie flopped backwards onto the unmade bed. ‘And you didn’t read anything from his jacket?’

‘Sadly not, and I held his arm for a good five minutes when I got there. Either he’s as emotionally blank as he seemed, or it was a very new jacket.

Believe me, if I’d picked up that he was an arrogant arsehole in the first two minutes, I wouldn’t have wasted an evening of my life being patronised by him.

I would have sprinted for the door without looking back. ’

‘Why didn’t you come and find me last night? When I didn’t see you at the pub, I assumed it was going really well. Not that you’d slunk back in for a mope.’

‘I didn’t mope. I did a face pack and a hair mask: some sensible self-care. I thought I would perk myself up by waking up in the morning all glowing and ready to laugh about it. But I’m not. I’m really not.’ Her bottom lip turned out, involuntarily.

Susie stood and grabbed her big sister by the arms, shocked by the burst of actual raw emotion from someone who’d often said that they could make it through Sleepless in Seattle with two fully dry eyes.

‘You’re not heartbroken over this idiot, are you?

! He sounds like a plonker. A plonker that you met once, not like when Abe— ’

A stony look from Temperance cut across Susie’s last word, and her lip was caught between her teeth and held in place for a minute.

They could tell each other anything: the ins and outs of a crap date, the bath bombs that gave them thrush, the gossip they’d picked up by touching someone’s shoulder on the bus.

But the one thing they did not talk about was Abel Gulliver: they boy who broke Temperance’s heart.

Well, not so much broke as incinerated into a million tiny particles.

‘No! No way. I’m not bothered about him.

But I’m fed up of all the shitty dates, Suse.

There have been so many. Like, so many !

The last time I met anyone half decent was that summer I interned on Carnaby Street.

And London to Devon is not a workable long-distance situation.

I’m not leaving the village anytime soon, so the man I love has to be local.

But I’ve Bumbled all the half-decent ones on the South Devon coast and .

. . I’m in my bed at 10.30pm on a Saturday night. ’ She shrugged.

Susie put her hands back on her hips. ‘That’s why you should have come to the pub! There were some quite cute backpackers in from the campsite. They were funny.’

‘I’m not looking for just funny – I’m looking for everything, for The One. Besides, I bet they were all nineteen. Please tell me you didn’t?’

Her little sister studied the warped beams of the ceiling. ‘Um . . .’

‘Susie! That’s cradle-robbing!’

‘Twenty-four is not that much older than nineteen, come on!’ Susie’s peachy cheeks turned a little strawberry. ‘And they might have been older, anyway. Why do you have to worry about The One? You’re twenty-nine, not exactly on the brink of death, babe. Can’t you just have a bit of fun? ’

Temperance stood up and grabbed her dressing gown from the back of the door.

‘By the time Mum was twenty-nine she’d had us both and had set up the shop: she knew what her life was about.

I just, I just,’ she shook her head, ‘have this feeling that somewhere out there is a love story for me, waiting to start. But I can’t get it started on my own. ’

Susie raised one eyebrow. ‘You just haven’t borrowed the right books from my spicy shelf. I can make you a shortlist, if you like?’

Temperance couldn’t help but snort a laugh.

‘Seriously! Don’t you ever get that . . .

pull? Like the other half of your heart is out there, walking around all handsome and nonchalant, and if you could just find him then together you’d make this incredible, perfect equation.

Bigger than the sum of your parts. You know? ’

Susie put her tongue in her cheek. ‘Not really. I don’t really like long-term jobs, Temps, let alone long-term relationships.’

Without the energy for an eye roll, Temperance turned on her heels and headed to the bathroom. She was due to open the shop in twenty minutes and she hoped that a shower would wash some of her grumpiness away.

Temperance wasn’t sure what felt worse: the sad flatness that followed another bad date or the lingering ache in her chest, nagging at her to find The One. Whichever it was, Temperance couldn’t keep going on like this.

Something had to change.