Judge Roberts acted quickly to determine what would happen to Trey now that he'd resurfaced in Wisconsin. The day after the tornado, on the advice of Father Fahey, he determined that Trey would remain in Weeping Willow until his eighteenth birthday and report in to a case manager twice each week. Although it was a much better fate than having to return to the misery of the Northern Reserve, Trey wasn't thrilled about being under his mother's thumb for the next few months. They were barely speaking since of course the matter of money ran like an undercurrent beneath each passing hour, threatening to carry them into battle. As soon as Mrs. Emory had learned that Violet's father was dead, she had gotten it into her head that Trey could sue Michael Simmons' estate for half of Violet's inheritance. She started chipping away at Trey before he'd even had a chance to shower off the last few days' grime.

My mother and father were kind enough to allow me to remain in Weeping Willow until Thursday, so Henry scheduled his return flight to France for the same day. Even though Mr. Simmons was dead and we were pretty sure we'd captured the evil of the curse in Laura's bottle, there were still a ton of loose ends to wrap up in town before I shipped out to Florida again. For starters, there was the matter of the rose bush which still grew behind the abandoned childhood home of Trey's mom.

A life for a life, Mrs. Emory had reasoned when she'd planted it. She'd planted that rose bush after being dumped by Violet's father and hearing that his wife was expecting a baby of her own. The time had come to destroy every remaining tie to Michael Simmons' cruelty, Mrs. Emory's jealousy, and the evil that had blossomed in the desire for so much revenge.

On Wednesday morning I informed my mother that Henry was coming to pick me and Trey up for lunch, and although I was technically under "house arrest" (this was my mom's little joke, but it was somewhat accurate), as always, mention of Henry changed my mother's mind.

"Heading back to your tennis school?" Mom asked him when she opened the front door for him.

"Yes, at least until the end of the summer," Henry confirmed.

"Très bien," my mother teased. If I didn't know any better, I would have guessed that she was flirting. So gross.

Outside as we climbed into Henry's truck for what would be the last time the three of us squeezed into the cab, Trey greeted Henry with a chill, "What's up, man?" We agreed to drive the long way around town toward Front Road to check out all of the storm damage because Trey and I had barely left our homes since Monday night. A lot of people seemed to have had the same idea, rolling through town at maddeningly slow speeds, surveying uprooted trees and broken windows as if we were all amateur insurance adjustors. There was a hint of warmth on the wind that day, and the boldness of the blue sky suggested that spring was finally, at long last, on its way.

Coach Stirling's Cadillac had been flipped over in the teacher's parking lot at the high school. As we rolled past, I could practically see the wheels turning behind Trey's eyes, assessing the damage. If there was anything Trey loved, it was figuring out mechanical puzzles—the more difficult, the better.

Damage within the gated community where Mischa lived had been minimal. It was much heavier over near where Candace's mother and stepfather lived. We drove past their house and found Julia, Candace's half-sister, sitting out on the front steps with a friend from school. Even though I'd only met her a handful of times, Julia seemed to recognize me and waved at us. I'd never noticed before how much she looked like Candace when she smiled.

"Is this is it?" Henry asked as slowed to a stop along Front Road. Set far back from the street, almost entirely obscured by overgrown grass, was a dilapidated house.

"Yep," Trey confirmed as he unbuckled his seat belt. Trey led the way down what had once been a gravel driveway toward the structure that had been his mother's childhood home. When the overgrown weeds cleared and I got my first glimpse of the one-story house, it was not at all what I was expecting. It had been over a decade since anyone had occupied the house. The roof had started to buckle, the front door had been torn off its hinges, and the exterior walls had been spray painted by vandals. Rather than walking straight around to the back of the house to address the reason why we'd driven out this way, Trey wandered in through the front doorway to take a look around at what remained.

Apprehensively, Henry and I followed Trey inside. I was highly conscious of how much noise I made as I stepped into the living room. Even though probably no one in town would have cared that we were at the old Svensson place, I still felt as if I were trespassing. The carpeting had worn away in patches and had been mostly destroyed by wild animals and bad weather. Shreds of the floral curtains still hung at lopsided angles in the glassless windows.

Although vandals had destroyed most of the furniture, they'd curiously left a water-stained family portrait in its frame on the wall. It made my heart ache to think about Trey's mom growing up in this house and then abandoning it to fall into such utter ruin. Maybe someday someone would stand in the ruins of my own bedroom, wondering what became of me. The speed at which a happy place could turn into a miserable one was something that was all too familiar to me, since I'd spent my entire childhood walking past the empty lot at the end of Martha Road where I had shared a bedroom with my twin for eight years before fire destroyed our old lives in a matter of minutes.

In the kitchen, Trey observed with dismay that the overhead cabinets had fallen off the wall and collapsed on the ground in a pile of splintered wood and rusty handles. "Too bad," he said apologetically when we entered the room. "When I was really little, before my grandmother died, she used to keep little boxes of raisins in here for whenever I came to visit."

Through the broken kitchen windows, we saw it: a spindly rose bush over four feet tall. Trey opened the house's back door and we stepped outside to inspect it. It was still early enough in spring that there weren't any blooms among its thorny branches. A sparrow darted out of the bush's branches toward the cerulean sky as soon as it heard the creak of the door opening.

"Well, here it is," Trey said. We hadn't discussed the best way to go about ridding the world of the cursed rose bush prior to our arrival at the Svenssons' old house. Trey held out his hand and Henry passed him the heavy pruning shears he'd brought from home, which we had all assumed would be the right tool for the job. The first branch Trey attempted to snip was surprisingly sinewy and durable. Trey twisted the shears at the point where he'd attempted to sever the branch and wiggled them back and forth to cut through the tenacious yellow fibers inside the bark. He handed the shears back to Henry and yanked at the dangling branch with his bare hand, finally breaking it free and cutting his palm on a thorn.

Henry seemed to be thinking the same thing I was. "We should have brought a saw or an axe," he said.

"We could come back," I suggested. We didn't have many tools at my house, but presumably Mr. Richmond had something back at Henry's house that we could use. However, the trunk of the rose bush appeared to be very strong. Even if we spent all afternoon twisting off the branches, we'd need a heavier-duty tool to destroy that trunk.

Trey put his hands on his hips and stared down the adversarial plant. "I don't want to leave and come back. Anything could happen to us if we do that."

He was right. Over the last year, every time that evil had been given a chance to intercept us in our efforts to break the curse, it had done its best to do exactly that.

"Do you have a lighter?" I asked Trey.

Without even replying, Trey reached into his pocket and produced a butane lighter. It took me a second to realize that it was the same lighter he'd pinched off a porch a few days earlier when we'd been walking along a highway in Arkansas. Those days of wandering already felt like a lifetime ago now that we were back in our hometown, surrounded by familiar people and places. With his thumb, he sparked a flame, and raised it to the exposed yellow flesh of the bush where he'd just torn off a branch.

A sinister wisp of smoke curled toward us from the branch as if a spirit inside the bush were slipping away. Although it was winter and the branches should have been dry, it became clear quickly that if we intended to burn the bush all the way down, we'd have to ignite it in multiple places. Trey touched the flame to all of its lower branches. The fire was slow to start, extinguishing itself on a few branches, which required Trey to light them again. Finally, as if the rose bush realized the futility of trying to resist the power of fire, the lower branches began to glow red hot from within. Fire enveloped the bush in a sudden blaze accompanied by a roar that made all of us take a step back in surprise.

"Damn. Look at that," Henry murmured in observation.

Together, in silence, we watched the bush burn as a putrid stench filled the air. It almost seemed as if the bush were squirming in agony as its branches blackened and shriveled. A dark cloud of smoke rose toward the cheerful sky, and I wondered if anyone else in town saw it and suspected danger. Luckily, the fire department was still too busy cleaning up tornado-related damage around Weeping Willow to be overly concerned with a suspicious-looking source of smoke in the distance.

None of us moved a muscle when the bush tilted toward the house and its peeling aluminum siding caught fire. At that moment, it was immediately obvious to all of us that the house would burn to the ground, too, but we all accepted the house's fate without comment. When the fire reached as high as the roof and nothing remained of the bush anymore but what looked like a glowing orb under the grass marking the place from which it had grown, Henry said, "We should probably get out of here." Although we all wanted the satisfaction of seeing everything related to the casting of the curse incinerated, we dutifully followed Henry around the side of the house to his truck.

At Bobby's, which had reopened that day for the first time since the tornado touched down, we joked about how much we wouldn't miss our small town in the weeks after Henry and I left respectively for France and Florida. None of us would miss Weeping Willow's lack of a Mexican restaurant, or the buttinsky-style questions of the woman who worked the cash register at Hennessey's Pharmacy, or the nasty brown stink bugs that overtook our town at the end of every April.

Trey held my hand in his under the table, which made me wish that I weren't scheduled to board a flight the following morning. Living in Florida was preferable to having to return to the Dearborn School for Girls, but knowing that Trey was biding his time, miserably waiting for me in Weeping Willow was going to be awful. I was mentally running through the process of talking to my mom about appealing to Judge Roberts to allow me to stay home when suddenly all three of us in unison heard the blare of fire truck sirens.

Not one, not two, but all three of our town's fire trucks raced past Bobby's in the direction of the Svenssons' house. "I guess it was naïve of us to think that fire would have put itself out," Trey quipped.

Little did we know the extent of damage caused by our irresponsibility until Mischa and Matt stopped by the diner to say goodbye, since Henry and I wouldn't have any other chance to see them prior to our departing flights the next day. Mischa was flying back to California that night, where her sister was still practicing relentlessly for the trials. "Oh my God, you guys," Mischa greeted us. "There's a crazy fire along Front Road. The police aren't even letting cars through."

As it turned out, the fire we started to burn down the rose bush in the yard of the old Svensson house engulfed the woods on the unincorporated side of town. After we paid our bill and stepped outside Bobby's into the parking lot, the stench of smoke and charred wood hung thick over our entire town. It was my least favorite smell in the world; one that crept into my head through my nostrils and lingered in my hair after I got home.

By nightfall, the fire department from Green Bay had been called in to drop retardant on the blaze by helicopter. People from all over town disobeyed the mayor and the police and drove over into the direction of Front Road to get a good look, being stopped by uniformed cops where the road had been closed off with yellow crime scene tape. Kids from the high school filled social media with pictures of the raging fire. The fire was so powerful that it was even covered by the nightly news, with reporters saying that the poor officials of Weeping Willow simply couldn't get a break. First the tornado, now a raging wildfire.

Shortly after dinner, there was a knock on our front door. Officer Marshall, Dan's dad, greeted Mom when she answered. "Hey, Deb," he said. "As I'm sure you're aware, the fire over in Tallmadge Woods still isn't under control. We're urging residents of this neighborhood to tune in to local cable because we may be issuing an evacuation order within the hour. It might be a good idea to collect all of your valuables, keep an eye on pets, and be ready to leave at a moment's notice."

Sensing an urge to see the fire's progress with my own eyes, I stepped into the back yard with Maude while Mom continued her conversation. From our deck, I could see the orange glow of fire reflecting off the ash that had collected in the sky over the woods. The air quality was so poor that my throat tickled as soon as I inhaled.

I wondered if the air in Hell similarly felt like it was hot enough to singe your lungs. At least in the version of my personal hell, there would be fire—and lots of it. Dread overtook my body. We had done this; we were responsible. Perhaps I was being paranoid, but it seemed like a rosebush unleashing an uncontrollable fire was the curse's way of coming after me in the manner that would terrify me most. Once again, Trey and I had thought we were finally extinguishing the problem that I'd started with Violet back in the fall, and instead we'd unleashed the fury of pure evil on not only our entire town, but all of the wild animals that occupied the woods along its eastern border.

"Looks pretty bad, huh?"

Trey's voice distracted me from the vengeful sky overhead. He'd slipped into his back yard while his mom was talking to the police next door. With a quick glance over my shoulder at the space in between our two homes, I noticed that there were police cars slowly driving up and down Martha Road. The cops were taking this probable evacuation pretty seriously.

I agreed, "Pretty bad." I wondered where we'd be taken if the mandate were issued. Having to spend the night in the gymnasium at the high school or somewhere in Ortonville was not very appealing. My flight back to Tampa was also scheduled to depart from Green Bay in less than twenty hours. The thought of leaving home when there was a chance that fire would devour my house and all of my possessions in my absence was pretty terrifying, and I knew that even in the face of a crisis Mom would make me board my flight.

Trey reached over the fence to interlace his fingers with mine. "It's like it knows, you know? Taking out everyone and everything it can as it's driven away," he said. He was referring to the curse and the forest fire as if they were the same thing, which they basically were.

"Do you think there's any chance..." I trailed off, not even wanting to hear my voice form the words that danced around inside my head. We should have been more careful about driving to the Svenssons' old house in Henry's truck. We should have made sure no one saw us turn onto the private road that led toward it. We should have taken steps to prevent ourselves from having left fingerprints in the house. I couldn't remember touching anything in particular, but I also hadn't been paying much attention. Arson was a serious crime. Starting a forest fire that resulted in significant property damage was a very, very serious crime.

"Not a chance," Trey shook his head. "Don't even think that way."

"You're right. You're right."

Trey shot a look toward the policemen talking to his mom on the front stoop of his house. "It's pretty weird though, you know? For a wildfire to burn this hot right after winter? I heard the cops talking to my mom about it. I mean, the ground is still wet from the snow. The fire shouldn't be spreading. But it's still burning as if it were the end of the summer."

"I wonder if they realize they're not fighting a regular fire," I murmured, watching the lights of helicopters flying overhead toward the blaze.

Mom and I slept on the couches in the living room that night, or rather, didn't sleep much while the television kept us from dozing off. By some miracle, a shift in the wind prevented the fire from coming any closer to Martha Road, and the evacuation order was never issued. However, the fire grew stronger as it pushed further east. Around two in the morning, an emergency news announcement interrupted the re-run of Law & Order that we were half-heartedly watching. A news reporter wearing a heavy coat near Front Road spoke directly to the camera as he held a News WGBA microphone. "Authorities are saying that at least two firefighters battling the forest fire in suburban Weeping Willow have gone missing. Full report at six."

As the channel switched to a commercial for yogurt, I sat straight up on the couch and rubbed my eyes. The reality of two more people dying all because of the dumb game I'd played with Violet back in the fall made my stomach turn. I felt like vomiting but was too afraid to make a mad dash for the bathroom down the dark hallway to budge.

This time, I couldn't really blame Violet. People were dying in their attempt to put out a fire that I'd lit with Trey and Henry. Even if it was tenacious evil that was fueling the fire, it was Trey's lighter that had sparked it.

I wasn't the only one who was restless all night. The second the sun peeked over the horizon, Trey tapped on our front door, knowing that his mother probably wouldn't allow him to leave the house after she woke up.

"It's not our fault," he assured me as we sat down on the cement front steps in front of my house. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders to pull me closer, and I wished I had grabbed a coat before stepping outside. It was barely thirty degrees outside, which made it even odder to think of the fire burning down all of Tallmadge Woods not far away. "I know what you're thinking about those firefighters who died. Something powerful is fueling that fire that has nothing to do with us."

"It still feels like it's our fault," I whispered. Part of me continued to suspect that a cavalcade of police cars were going to come speeding around our corner at any second to arrest me and Trey for arson and murder.

"You don't know, McKenna, how many people might have died if we hadn't ended it this way. Eventually the fire will die out. All of the damage in town from the tornado will be repaired. People won't think about Olivia, or Candace, or Tracy, or all the kids who got hurt on the ski trip so much anymore. It'll be over. We didn't cast this curse. We didn't start this." His blue eyes looked over at his own house as if he were insinuating that his mother was responsible, ultimately, for all of the deaths that had occurred in our small town since September. "It's not our fault that any of this happened, and it won't be our fault when people do their best to forget."

He was right. Thinking about Olivia and Candace's gravesites filled me with sorrow, but people were always eager to put pain behind them. As impossible as it seemed to believe while a memorial for the kids who'd died in the bus crash in Michigan was still on display at the high school, there would come a time when it would be considered bad taste to raise the topic of the crash in polite conversation. The only way for us to ever be free from all of the chaos that Violet's curse had caused was to also let go, or at least to accept that everyone else in town would.

The thought of boarding a plane in a matter of hours filled me with anxiety. I wasn't ready to let go forever of what had happened in Weeping Willow. I squeezed Trey's hand harder, not wanting to face the next few months apart from him. "What are you going to do here until June when I get back?" I asked. "You're not going to fly off to Alaska to become a deep sea fisherman, are you?" Not even two weeks had passed since he'd escaped from Northern Reserve with the intention of putting as much distance as possible between himself and Wisconsin.

"I actually don't like boats much," Trey admitted. "I don't know. Maybe I'll get a job."

"No one in town will hire you," I reminded him with a smile.

He smirked. "I know. Maybe I'll have to get one of those work-from-home jobs, like selling insurance over the phone."

"I wouldn't recommend counting on your excellent customer service skills to generate income," I teased him.

Trey kissed me on the cheek. "You're right. Maybe I can scrub toilets at the Ortonville Deluxe Motel."

"I've seen your bedroom, remember? No one is going to hire you for your janitorial skills."

Even though the fire hadn't gotten any closer to Martha Road, Mom brought Maude along for the ride to the airport the next morning just to be on the safe side. "I trust you're going to walk straight into the airport, pass through security, and board your flight," Mom said as the car idled curb-side at the departures drop-off.

"Mom," I groaned. "I swear, I will get on the plane. Even if terrorists storm the airport, I will make my flight."

She climbed out of the car and met me on the passenger side to smash me in a bear hug. "Be good. Be safe. I love you," she said into my hair.

"Call me if we end up homeless," I requested, avoiding the more precise way of saying call me if our house burns down. If your house burns down once in your lifetime, it's not something you joke about ever again.

After passing through the security checkpoint, I bought myself a coffee and marveled at the strangeness of how busy the airport was on a weekday morning. Oddly, my flight was scheduled to depart from the very same gate at which I'd waited about two weeks earlier, when Trey had intercepted me and we'd embarked on an adventure involving witchcraft and nearly dying. The clerk at the newsstand where I purchased a cheesy romance novel did a triple-take as I paid, probably recognizing me from my picture having been on the evening news so frequently over the last two weeks. Her reaction made me self-conscious; I let my hair fall forward to hide my face as a little as I nestled into a seat at my gate.

Before I even reached the bottom of the first page of my book, the weight of someone's stare brought me to attention. At the next gate, visible over the tops of several rows of seats, stood Henry Richmond. He hesitated for a meaningful beat before waving at me.

The sight of him—his green eyes, his broad shoulders—made my heart stop for a second.

When he took a seat instead of approaching me, I wondered why he was keeping his distance after everything we'd been through together. He hadn't seemed mad the day before, when we'd said goodbye after lunch at Bobby's. We'd even texted a few times before nightfall about the insanity of the spreading fire. So I closed my book and wove my way through the rows of chairs that separated us.

"Hey," I said, as I stood before him. All of the other seats were occupied.

Henry didn't look thrilled to see me, which hurt my feelings a little. I suspected that perhaps he was anxious about the fire that was still burning in Weeping Willow just like I was, because it was possible that the long arm of legal justice would be able to reach us at our respective destinations later that week. "Aren't you even going to say goodbye?" I asked.

"I thought it would be easier if we didn't," Henry said with a shrug. "Besides, we sort of said goodbye yesterday, right? And it's not goodbye forever. Just until we meet again."

I shot daggers at the woman sitting next to Henry with my eyes; she ignored me as she slowly chewed her Croissan'wich, her jaw rolling in a circular motion.

"I guess." Perhaps a year earlier if I'd run into Henry Richmond in public, I would have shied away from even making eye contact with him because he was our high school's handsome tennis star and I was a big nobody as a freshman. But since being reintroduced to him at Olivia's house the night of her sixteenth birthday party, Henry had become one of my closest friends. I'd trusted him with my life and he'd never let me down; I'd trusted him at some points even more than I'd trusted Trey. Maybe I'd overestimated the value of our connection, or maybe I'd underestimated his feelings for me in spite of my relationship with Trey.

"Well, have a safe flight. And maybe I'll see you this summer," I said wistfully. Although Henry wasn't my boyfriend and it didn't make any sense for me to feel like crying, my throat was closing up.

I turned to walk back toward my own gate with my heart plummeting downward inside my chest. It wasn't even fair to feel slighted by Henry; I didn't know what I could possibly expect from him. He obviously wasn't going to pine away for me forever, and yet... it hurt to be dismissed. At that moment I remembered for the first time in what felt like ages that the silver orchid pendant which Henry had given me in acknowledgement of what would have been our first date, the Homecoming dance, was possibly waiting for me in Florida. If the airline had delivered my abandoned suitcase to my dad's house, it would be in Tampa when I arrived.

"McKenna, wait."

Henry stood behind me, his eyes apologetic. "Look. The truth is, it's just weird going our separate ways, you know? I see your face and it reminds me how good life was before Olivia died, and I just...I just wish that we could be together. That's all. I wish you'd apply to Northwestern and I'd enroll again next year... and we could spend holidays with my parents, and everything would be better then."

He paused to take a breath and quite possibly to fight tears that he wasn't going to permit me to see. I wanted to reply but I could barely breathe. He'd practically come close to asking me to marry him.

"I took a lot for granted before this year, you know? I had everything. My life was pretty perfect and I didn't even see it. Now, it's hard to leave this place. It feels like the second I turn my back, it might disappear. It's hard to leave you. And if you were in my life, I wouldn't take anything for granted again."

For a fraction of a second, I saw life in perfect clarity as I studied the angles of Henry's solemn face. The confusion of it all, the infinite options and outcomes of decisions, the impossibility of having two perfect things at the same time—which ultimately made them both imperfect because they could never exist in unison. Relief had flooded over me the night Trey and I had been aboard the Amtrak train bound for Texas, when I'd awakened to find a text message from Henry asking if I was safe. That same warmth made its way from my chest through my extremities as I stood in the airport, listening to Henry bare his soul.

My love for Trey was endless because it would always end in a question mark. As much as I knew him, he was equally a mystery. He was like a bottomless well, and I'd never be able to see my own reflection in the water at the bottom. My tie to him was one that reached into the past farther than my memory extended, and Trey bound me to the darkness by which I defined my sense of self. He knew me, he knew my truest self, he knew what had made me different from my identical twin. I believed in every cell of my body that Trey Emory would never love another girl as much as he loved me.

In contrast, my love for Henry was tangible and steadfast. There were no enigmas surrounding Henry; he said what he meant and unfailingly expressed himself with sensitivity. He kept no secrets from me. If I'd asked him in that moment to cancel his flight and come with me to Florida, he would have. But Henry would never know the visions that I stored in my head of Jennie waving farewell to me from the flames that consumed her. He would never be capable of understanding the guilt that I carried in my heart for being the twin who survived. Those deep, dark corners of me would terrify him, and in that sense he would never truly know who I was.

In that moment, gazing into Henry's green eyes, I had a choice to make, but that fate and evil and every force of energy driving planets to circle stars in every universe had already made it for me. Henry represented the sunlit path that led into a safer forest than the one into which I would follow Trey time and time again for the rest of our lives.

"I'm going to miss you," I said to Henry, hearing my voice crack mid-sentence. What I meant was that I'd miss him the moment I sat down in my seat on the plane bound for Tampa just as much as I would miss him when he inevitably fell in love with someone else and began to forget what he ever saw in McKenna Brady back at home in Weeping Willow. I'd miss him forever, miss the life we could have created together, because a small part of me would always wonder about the beautiful world I would have inhabited as Mrs. Henry Richmond. This ache in my heart for wanting to be the girl that Henry longed for me to be would never fade.

He reached for both of my hands and replied, "I'm going to miss you, too."

As we pressed our fingertips together, I knew I would remember that moment for the rest of my life. It was the moment when I became an adult, when I fully realized that we choose our own paths... even when we are sometimes terrified of where they might lead.