"See that? Glenn said they're putting in one of those cookie stores that makes the giant birthday cookies."

The next morning, I coerced Mom into driving me to the supermarket by insisting that I had an irrepressible craving for sweet potatoes. Even though she was definitely suspicious about my request, an hour later she pulled her grocery shopping list off the fridge and slipped it into her purse. It was not a coincidence that I'd asked Violet to meet me in the frozen food aisle. With Easter just two days away, I'd figured it would be pretty easy to talk Mom into a trip across town to the food store. She'd always been a sucker for coloring hard-boiled eggs and hiding a basket of candy for me on Easter morning.

The tiny strip mall across the intersection from the grocery store that used to only boast a Remax real estate office and a JC Penney catalog outlet that had been shuttered since I was in junior high was suddenly bustling. A fancy new pet grooming salon had opened next to the storefront that used to house the catalog outlet, and a Coming Soon! sign had been hung in the window of the storefront next to the laundr-o-mat.  It made me feel both overly protective of my small town and eager to leave again, seeing how much it had changed in the two and a half months I'd been gone. Willow would always be my hometown, but I already felt an urgency to get back to somewhere else.

As if she could read my mind about feeling so out of place in my own home, Mom asked, "Have you been making friends at school in Florida? Your dad says you're reticent on the topic."

I fought the urge to exhale in exasperation. This was my mother's subtle way of picking a fight with me. "Not really, Mom. I'm just trying to focus on grades. I know you're really worried about me getting into college." Making new friends in Florida was a topic I preferred to avoid with both of my parents. Florida, to me, was a temporary situation. I wasn't sure what would follow it, but I sure as heck wasn't planning on going to college there or being there for even a minute longer than necessary after high school graduation. There was a very good chance I'd be making my escape from Florida as soon as that summer, although I couldn't have told either of my parents about my plans.

"Well, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to make a few friends down there. It wouldn't kill you to go to the movies once in a while with some normal girls your own age."  Mom flipped on her turn signal at the intersection near the grocery store parking lot.

Her subtle jab at the friends I'd made at the beginning of the school year at home in Willow put me on edge.  She just had no idea whatsoever how much it had meant to me to be welcomed into Olivia's tight-knit circle after having been bullied and avoided for all of elementary school and junior high. It wasn't even as if Olivia Richmond and Candace Cotton had been stereotypical popular girls before their deaths. Olivia had been generous and polite, and had encouraged me to run for student government. Candace had been outrageously funny and I would have trusted her with my deepest secrets.  And Mischa, well, I had to hand it to my mom, Mischa probably wouldn't have fallen into anyone's definition of normal once you got to know her, but she was still every bit as good a friend to me as Cheryl, Erica, and Kelly had been before junior year. After everything Mischa and I had been through together—the night we played the game of "Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board" at Olivia's party, driving up north in the middle of a blizzard to pick up a hitchhiking ghost, contacting Olivia's spirit on a Ouija board—Mischa was more like a sister than a friend.

"Mom," I snapped. "I can either be popular or get good grades. It's one or the other, not both, and I don't think you get that all normal kids my age want to do is drink and smoke weed. I'm trying to stay out of trouble, so just leave it."

She exhaled loudly after we pulled into the parking lot. "Fine, you're right. I trust you to make your own decisions."

I spotted what I assumed was Violet's tiny gray car in the parking lot as Mom roamed around looking for a spot. It was a Friday morning and the kids in Weeping Willow didn't have the week off for Spring Break like I did; their school break was the week after the holiday. I hadn't really thought about it until we were on our way to the store, but Violet was cutting class to meet me. Whatever she wanted to discuss related to those files she'd emailed me had to have been seriously important. Violet may have been basically a murderess, but she was also a model student, not to mention Junior Class President.

Of course, after she turned off the car's engine, Mom couldn't resist the urge to add, "Cheryl Guthries is a normal kid your age and I doubt she drinks and smokes weed."

Cheryl Guthries, who had been my best friend all the way through junior high, had managed to convince Judge Roberts when she was apprehended at the border with me, Henry, and Trey back in January that she had just driven all the way from Weeping Willow to meet us out of concern for Violet Simmons. Despite the fact that she very obviously had been involved in both me and Trey breaking out of our respective reform schools, my mother still considered her to be an angel, a role model. I owed Cheryl a lot, I really did, but it still irked me that my mother believed her to be the most innocent of all my friends.

Once inside the store, I realized that my big plan to ditch Mom and meet Violet in the frozen food aisle was not exactly the most stealth operation I'd ever concocted. A buttery smell from the bakery section filled the entire store, and a jazzy instrumental version of "Careless Whisper" played on the overhead sound system. One of the front wheels of the cart my mother was pushing idly spun around in circles. Mom rambled to herself about the ham she planned to make for dinner on Sunday, and how much Glenn loved carrot cake. I distractedly realized that she was inviting me to ask her to elaborate about her relationship with Glenn, but my attention was on the sign hanging over the frozen food aisle. My pulse was racing. If Mom pushed her cart down that aisle and saw Violet standing there in the middle of a weekday morning, quite obviously waiting for me, I would have been totally busted. And there would definitely not be a second opportunity for me to cross paths with Violet on this trip if I were to blow this one chance. I was booked on the first flight back to Tampa on Monday morning.

"He is pretty self-sufficient, unlike your father. You'd be surprised. He even knows how to make lasagna that isn't half-bad. It's refreshing, you know? Spending time with a man who can take care of himself and doesn't expect me to wait on him, hand and foot." Mom was still talking a mile a minute as we edged around the end of the snack and carbonated beverage aisle. If she'd bothered to turn to her left and look at my face, she would have seen that my eyes were wild with fear, and narrow rills of sweat were pouring down my forehead from anxiety. Under different circumstances, I might have defended my dad a little, and tell her that since he'd moved to Florida he'd learned how to scramble eggs and was downright handy with the juicer. But that day, I was so focused on slipping away to have a secret conversation with Violet that I let her snub slide.

Violet stood in the middle of the aisle, her back pressed against one of the frosty freezer doors, quite obviously not interested in buying any of the bags of frozen vegetables on the shelves behind her. Our eyes locked and I ever-so-barely shook my head at her with tightly pursed lips, hoping that my mom would continue staring straight ahead as she rolled the cart on to the next aisle.

"I remember when your father and I were first married, when I was in graduate school, and we got into this epic fight about why I always ended up making dinner even though I had a full-time course load. He insisted on making dinner one night just to prove that he could, and do you know what he made? Hot dogs. I mean, what kind of a fool doesn't know how to make hot dogs? That's not cooking."

We were safely in the next aisle, standing in front of the spices. Mom reached for a bottle of paprika. For a second I marveled at how different our small grocery store in Willow was to the flashy superstores in Tampa, with full mammoth displays of pineapples and an entire corner of the store dedicated to organic, all-natural bulk seeds and nuts. If I'd never been sent away from Weeping Willow, I probably never would have known that in comparison to other towns, ours was a little dingy and behind the times.

"Mom," I interjected. I had to find Violet in the store before she gave up on me and drove back to the high school.  "I'll be right back.

"What do you need, hon?" she asked, not wanting to let me out of her sight for even a second.

"Just... tampons," I sputtered. "I don't like asking Rhonda for them in Florida."

This wasn't a total lie, but I doubted Mom would insist on following me to the women's hygiene aisle.

Violet was still waiting in the frozen food aisle, her arms crossed over her chest.  As soon as she saw me approaching she uncrossed her arms so that I could see she was holding paper in her left hand.  "Here," she said, extending her arm toward me.

"I don't have much time," I said, grabbing the two sheets of paper away. Quickly, I scanned the contract, and felt guilty for folding such an old, yellowing document, but had to make it fit in the pocket of my coat.

"You have to give that contract to... your boyfriend," Violet said, hesitating when she said the words your boyfriend, as if she wasn't sure what the correct term was.

"He already knows about all this. He's known for a long time, even before you mentioned it in Michigan," I replied. Maybe Violet had forgotten that she, herself, had informed Trey back in Michigan that her biological father was also his biological father.

"Yeah, but that's actual legal proof. I found it in my grandmother's old office," Violet said. She studied me for a second, her eyes narrowing, before she added, "Think like an attorney for a second, McKenna. That document verifies on paper that my father acknowledged Trey is his son. The hundred thousand dollars that it says his mom took in the contract is nothing compared to what's rightfully his if he were to split my inheritance with me."

I rubbed the old paper between my fingers in my coat pocket, wondering if any of that would hold meaning for Trey at all. He tended to have high standards about how people should act, and I suspected that he'd consider it beneath him to grovel for money from a father who didn't want him.

"Seriously, McKenna," Violet said, "Half of it's his. I want him to have it. That piece of paper?" She nodded downward at my coat pocket. "That's my mother's worst nightmare. My father told me about Trey because he figured I'd hear about it from someone else at school when we moved here, but my mother has no idea he exists. I mean, Trey even said the day when we were all in Michigan, at that park, he couldn't believe that my mom hadn't noticed how much he looks like my dad during all the court stuff back in the fall. But the thing is, she did. At one point she looked right at Trey and said to my dad, he's the spitting image of you."

I had actually been kind of wondering how Violet's mother had spent so many hours in the Shawano County courtroom with Trey and not put the pieces of her husband's puzzle of a life together upon seeing how much Trey resembled Mr. Simmons. They had the same ice blue eyes, dark hair, and sharp cheekbones.

"So," Violet said, shrugging her shoulders. "If you give that to Trey, he'll have the power to break up my parents' marriage and walk away with enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his life. I don't know if I can ever make it up to you guys for all the stuff that's happened, but that's at least a start."

It didn't feel natural to trust Violet after she'd basically killed Olivia and Candace. Or not killed with her bare hands, but had willed to death by offering their souls up to the evil spirits that had been tormenting her.  The thought that occupied my mind like a giant brick was that Violet's inheritance had included the enormous mansion on the outskirts of town where the Simmons lived. She'd told us it was the main reason her family had moved back to Weeping Willow after her grandmother had died; Violet had been named the sole inheritor, and her Uncle Edward had contested the will. That house... When I'd first come home from the Dearborn School for Girls, the reform boarding school where I'd been sent back in November as a punishment for attacking Violet and stealing the locket I had believed was giving her paranormal abilities, Olivia's ghost had drawn a picture of the Simmons' mansion in the steam on my window. Now Violet was suggesting that Trey should try to legally secure half of that house for himself. Very suspicious.

I was wasting time, I knew. In a matter of seconds my mother was probably going to come around the end of the aisle in search of me. "I have to go," I said. "My mom's here, and I really can't let her see us together." I walked to the end of the aisle, checked in both directions to make sure my mom wasn't anywhere near, and made my way over to the aisle where feminine products were sold. But when I looked over my shoulder, I saw that Violet was following me.

"So, are you going to give it to him?" she asked. Her blue eyes were round with hope.

Back in September at the start of junior year at Weeping Willow High School, Violet had been the new girl at school. She'd arrived with an impeccable wardrobe from Lake Forest, a posh suburb of Chicago, and Olivia had welcomed her as well as me into our high school's very small, very elite group of popular kids. It felt like a lifetime ago that we'd all been so fascinated with Violet and her cashmere sweaters and skinny jeans from Saks Fifth Avenue. Our town was so unimpressive and out of the way that it was very rare for new kids to ever show up in our classes. Violet had been a person of fascination, and she'd repaid Olivia's generosity by sentencing her to death in a gruesome car crash. Her strange persistence about the contract justified how heartless I'd been to her in January when we'd held her hostage in Michigan until she played the game "Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble" with us in an attempt to lift the curse she'd put on my friends at Olivia's birthday party in September. Justification was a good thing, because I'd started feeling a lot of weird regret and guilt in Florida recently. Violet was up to something, I just knew it.

"Seriously, Violet, get out of here," I hissed. "If my mom sees you, I'm going to be on the first plane back to Florida."

She looked as if I'd slapped her across the face, and backed away from me in two big steps. "Okay, okay," she said, stunned.

"Look," I blurted, hating myself for being unable to just be cruel to her when she'd been so selfishly cruel to me, "I don't even know when I'm ever going to see him again, okay? Chances are good that you'll see him before I will."

This was the heartbreaking reality I had yet to fully face while down in Florida. Trey was back up north at the Northern Reserve reform school for boys. He'd been sent there back in November after the court proceedings in Ortonville, and had been promptly returned there after our little adventure in January. I'd also spent the better parts of November and December at a reform boarding school in Michigan, and although life at the Dearborn School for Girls had been grim, it was a cakewalk compared to the conditions under which Trey lived at Northern Reserve. His school was practically a jail for kids, encircled by a fence. The students there wore prison-like uniforms and all had to shave their heads. They were basically denied any form of individual expression, and for someone as sensitive as Trey, that was worse than a physical punishment.

There was a chance he'd be let out of Northern Reserve in June for the summer, although in his letters he hinted that not all of the school's students were released for the break. He'd turn eighteen in July and we both assumed he'd be able to leave then, although Judge Roberts hadn't ever specifically said that the charges against us would drop once we were legally considered adults. Whether or not he'd come to fetch me in Florida, I didn't know, and couldn't ask in my letters to him because all of his mail was scoured by the administrators at his school. While I definitely wanted him to take me along with him wherever he went, I was thoroughly freaked out about the possibility of running away from home before graduating from high school, I also couldn't bear the thought of him out in the world starting his adult life without me.

"Oh," she said. Suddenly she darted away, and when I looked to my left I saw my mother entering the aisle with her cart.

"Ready?" she asked me cheerfully, providing me with reassurance that she had not caught a glimpse of Violet.

I plucked a cardboard box off the shelf without even paying attention to which brand I'd chosen and said, "Yep."

On the ride home, I was silent, lost in thought about the contract and the note in my pocket. Mom chirped away about the dinner she planned to make that night: pasta with lamb ragu and the sweet potatoes I'd requested, followed by a banana cream pie, which was allegedly Glenn's favorite. This was her way of informing me that Glenn would be back for dinner, which was fine with me, but it struck me as funny that he even bothered leaving when he apparently spent so much time on our couch. I almost said, Why doesn't he just move in¸ but luckily realized before the words left my mouth that I'd sound like a cranky brat if I actually said that, even though I harmlessly wondered what was preventing him from just moving in.

I hadn't had a chance to ask Violet for more information about the other item she'd handed me, the note about planting trees on the property of the Simmons estate. That struck me as more important than whatever silliness she had cooked up about Trey suing her father for half of her inheritance. If Violet had been poking around in her grandmother's office in the mansion when she found the contract about Trey's paternity, then it was reasonable to assume that she'd also found that odd scrap of paper in the office, too. My head began spinning with the disconnected fragments of the story I'd been trying to piece together for six months: the mansion built by Violet's grandparents, their feud with her grandfather's former partner in the construction business they'd founded together, the souls of the daughters that Violet's mother had lost before and after her birth, and how Trey's familial connection tied him to the curse on Violet. Realizing I'd been rudely ignoring my mother all the way back to our house, I focused for a second. She seemed to be waiting for me to say something, although if she'd asked me a question I was completely oblivious.

"You know, Mom, I wouldn't think it was weird or anything if Glenn moved in," I blurted randomly. "It seems like you guys are pretty happy together."

Mom slowed down to turn right onto our street, Martha Road, and said, "Well, that's nice to hear."

As we turned, I caught a glimpse of the empty corner lot where our old house once stood. If there was anything I did not miss about my hometown, it was that corner lot. It was particularly miserable at this time of spring, when melting snow heaps revealed rich black slicks of mud. Candy wrappers and cigarette butts littered the overgrown yellow grass that poked through the dirty snow. Seeing the place that I held so sacred in my heart in such a dismal state made me kind of wish that the town would finally vote to do something with it after all these years...

Even if my twin sister had died in the fire that had reduced our house to cinders the night that our old house burned down in that very spot.

"We do enjoy each other's company. However, there's Maude to think of, and Glenn has two cats and a dog of his own. I'm not sure either one of us is eager to give up our freedom," Mom continued.

For a split second I wondered how much Glenn knew about the fire, and if he was aware that our old house had burned down right there, on the corner, in the abandoned lot. Maybe that had something to do with why he hadn't moved in yet. It was a little freaky that my mom still lived on the same block.

The space between us in the front seat of the car filled with alarm as we reached the middle of the block and both saw the pick-up truck in our driveway at the same time. A pick-up in the driveway meant only one thing: Henry Richmond. He climbed out of the driver's side as soon as he saw us approaching, and waved at my mother. My heart began beating perilously fast at the sight of him; he was supposed to be in France, not back in Weeping Willow.

Seeing Henry Richmond without having time to prepare myself for his appearance was like seeing Christian Bale as Batman suddenly standing before me in the moonlight. His auburn hair was a little longer than it had been in January, like maybe he'd decided to try out a new look in Europe. He wore a gray overcoat that I didn't recognize from his high school years with a black scarf wrapped casually around his neck. Because I hadn't seen him in months and hadn't been expecting to see him at all on this trip, I was both surprised and embarrassed by how my heart leapt at the sight of him. I'd had an awful crush on him when he was still in high school, two years ahead of me. He was our town's tennis star and even more glamorously, he was Olivia's older brother. Of course, my feelings had shifted toward Trey in September after Olivia died, but I couldn't deny that my pulse quickened when Henry was around.

"I thought Henry Richmond was in France this spring," my mother said as she parked next to his truck in our driveway.

"I did, too."

When I climbed out of the passenger side of Mom's car and stood face to face with Henry, nothing could have reduced the smile that spread across my face. His green eyes twinkled mischievously at me before he said, "Hi."

"What are you doing in town?" my mother asked from the other side of the car before I had a chance to ask the very same question.

Henry looked into my eyes for a second longer before replying, "I just got in this morning. My mom asked me to come home for Easter, so I'm home for a few days. The tennis camp closes next week anyway, so I figured I could either blow all the money I've made so far exploring Paris, or just come home."

His reason for being back in Wisconsin was plausible enough, but I suspected he was lying. Back in January when I'd received the first and only letter he'd sent to me from France, he had seemed pretty adamant about staying in France until he'd had a chance to completely recover from Olivia's death, everything that Mischa, Trey, and I had told him about the game we'd played with Violet that had resulted in Olivia's car crash, and the debacle we'd dragged him into in Michigan.

"Well, it's always nice to see you, Henry," Mom said, pulling one of our grocery bags out of the trunk.

"Let me help you with those, Mrs. Brady," Henry offered, taking the bag from her and scooping the other bag out of the trunk.

Mom slammed the trunk shut and said, "Why, thank you, Henry," before raising her eyebrows suggestively at me across the roof of the car. I wasn't sure if she was trying to insinuate that Henry was more polite than Trey, or interested in me the same way that Trey was, or both.

Henry followed us up the stairs and into the house. Maude, my mother's puppy, yipped and danced around at his feet excitedly as we crossed the living room and entered the kitchen to set the bags down. Henry had been to my house before back in January, but it hadn't occurred to me then to wonder what he might make of our small house. The Richmonds' house on Cabot Drive was an immaculate two-story home with a professionally landscaped lawn. Mrs. Richmond had the living room and kitchen remodeled right before Olivia started high school, and their appliances were all stainless steel and modern. Our house was a small two-bedroom with carpet in desperate need of replacement. One of the walls in our living room was covered in dark paneling that my mother often said she wanted to have torn out, but she never got around to actually doing it.

To be hospitable, Mom put on a pot of coffee and grilled Henry about how he'd been spending his time in France. "Are you eating lots of croissants?" My mom had never been out of the country before. Neither of my parents had any interest in international travel. Probably up until my junior year of high school I hadn't thought much about seeing the world, but exotic locations filled my thoughts constantly. If we were ever able to successfully break the curse that Violet had cast and move on with our lives, I wanted to roam through every open air market, smell every essential oil, see the sun rise over every mountain range, and walk every beach I could.

"Not so many croissants," Henry told her. "My first week in Grignon, I hit the bakery in the nearest town over pretty hard. Thankfully I got a grip. Everyone at the tennis camp jokes about how American instructors always gain five pounds during their first month on the job."

"Well, you don't look like you've gained any weight," my mother assured him, setting a carton of cream and bowl of sugar down on the table in our kitchen.

After he finished his coffee, Henry thanked my mother for her generosity and said, "Well, I should be getting home. I told my mom I'd go to Ortonville this afternoon to see some romantic comedy with her that my father refuses to see."

My mom didn't raise an eyebrow when I followed Henry out to his truck to say goodbye. The few minutes we'd have alone were the entire reason I suspected he'd driven over, and quite possibly the real reason he'd flown across the Atlantic on short notice. As soon as I pulled the front door of my house closed behind me I asked Henry, "Why are you really back in Willow, Henry? Did you hear about Mr. Portnoy?"

Henry shook his head. "My mom told me about him when she picked me up at the airport. I had no idea, but I feel awful about it. How's Mischa holding up?"

My mouth twisted into a knot. Although I'd drafted at least ten letters to him about my suspicion that instead of breaking the curse we'd simply shifted its power from Violet to Mischa back in January, I'd never sent any of them. It hadn't seemed fair to burden him with a situation in Wisconsin when he was in France trying to put the last few months behind him, and I was all the way in Florida unable to deal with Mischa's situation at all.

"What is it?" he asked, sensing by my reaction that something was gravely wrong.

"When we made Violet play the game in Michigan? I don't think we broke the curse," I said carefully, checking over my shoulder to make sure my mom wasn't spying on us through the living room window. "I think we just transferred it to Mischa because it skipped her when it was her turn to die." We thought we'd been quite clever, hiding Mischa away in a religious sanctuary whose owner told us that evil couldn't reach her there, but every single time we thought we'd outsmarted the evil spirits who had forced Violet into killing people, they'd tricked us.

I was expecting Henry to look crushed; it had been vital to him to break the curse so that he could feel like he'd brought about justice for Olivia's death in a roundabout way.  But instead he just shook his head and said, "I figured as much."

Even though I knew if I lingered in the driveway too long my mom would either get suspicious about what Henry and I were up to, or would tease me about the two of us having some kind of romantic connection (she was pretty desperate to break me and Trey up after all of the trouble with the police we'd gotten into), I put my hands on my hips. "Henry, how in the world could you have figured that out from all the way in Europe?"

"Listen, do you remember that girl Laura from The Occult Bookstore we went to in Chicago?" Henry's eyes flashed upward toward my living room window, and I knew from the way he changed his posture that I had been correct and my mom was totally spying on us. Henry, Mischa, and I had found ourselves at a specialty bookstore on the north side of Chicago back in January. The nerdy bespectacled clerk there had been very intrigued by our description of the curse that Violet had put on our friends. We were desperate to do something—anything—to break the curse before Mischa died because she was the next in its path. Laura, the clerk, had taught me how to use a pendulum and had told me discreetly that she thought I might have a special knack for channeling psychic energy, which was so freaky I hadn't given it much of a second thought.

"Yeah, of course," I said. I also remembered that Laura the clerk had taken a keen interest in handsome Henry, which had make me weirdly possessive about him.

"She emailed me, which was super weird. I don't even really have WiFi at the tennis school. If I want to check email I have to go down to the lounge area, and I don't often do that because most of the students are these super rich old ladies who just want to flirt with me."

In that moment, I could visualize perfectly what the tennis school where Henry worked was like: the blond, tan wives of aristocrats sipping bubbly glasses of Prosecco after their morning tennis lessons.  

"What did she say?" I asked, having a fairly good idea that at least one of the things Laura had said was that she and Henry should totally hang out and get coffee some time.

"Remember how we did that weird thing with the two mirrors? Well, I guess a few weeks after we stopped by the store, Laura was working on a similar truth-telling spell with her boss, and it wouldn't work. For some reason, the only image that kept coming up in the mirrors were of trees."

I bit my lower lip. Of course. Those five trees on the Simmons' property, one planted for each of the baby daughters that Mrs. Simmons lost.

"That was why she emailed me. Her boss thought that one of the spirits we pulled up wanted to make sure we understood that when the curse was originally cast, it was cast five times along with the planting of a sapling. Laura said that's how the most powerful witchcraft works, it's all in equal balance with nature. You give a life, you create a life."

"So... we just chop down all the trees with chainsaws," I said flatly. That had been our somewhat dramatic and kind of ridiculous plan a long time ago, and it was seeming less absurd now that I was hearing what Henry had flown home to tell me. As if I knew where I could get my hands on a chain saw, or how to operate one without dismembering myself.

"Not that simple," Henry said, shoving his hands in the pockets of his gray winter jacket. "Trees have roots. Deep, strong roots. A curse cast with the planting of a tree is powerful because in order for us to break it, we have to destroy the entire tree, including the roots."

I thought about that for a moment, and even with my extremely limited knowledge of pine trees and dendrology in general, it seemed pretty much impossible to kill every single cell of a tree. "Shiiiit," I muttered.

"Yeah," Henry agreed. He suddenly seemed antsy to leave.

"Does my mom keep looking out the window?" I asked.

He smiled and subtly nodded. "I should get going," he said. "She has every right to be freaked out about any of us being in contact." He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a small cardboard box that looked like it had come from a jewelry store. "I got you this. In France. I hope it's okay, I mean, that I got you something."

I accepted the box and was speechless, afraid to open it. A year earlier, when I was a sophomore and Henry was still a senior, never would I have dared to dream that he'd ever fly home to Weeping Willow with a gift for me from France. I thought of Trey's blue eyes, how smooth and pale his skin was, and the warmth of his body and felt like the right thing to do would have been to hand the box back to Henry and decline it.

But the honest truth was, whatever was in that box? I wanted it.

"Go ahead," Henry encouraged me. "Open it."

After a moment's hesitation I said, "I can't, Henry. It's too much."

He looked down at my driveway, clearly disappointed, but didn't take the box back. Finally he said, "You have to. It's for you. Look, McKenna, I understand if you and Trey are... you know, if you're not available. But you can't blame a guy for trying, right?"

I was sure that my cheeks were blazing as bright red as possible. There had been an awkward moment between me and Henry the night he'd helped me slip away from my boarding school when I thought he might kiss me, but he hadn't. Months ago, the very same night when Violet put a curse on Olivia, Candace, and Mischa, Henry had asked to be my date to the Homecoming dance. At the time, I'd figured he was most likely asking because I was friends with his sister and he knew it was important to Olivia that I have a date for the dance. But now he was making it clear in no uncertain terms that he was interested in me.

My fingers trembled as I lifted the lid of the box. Inside of it, under a thin piece of brushed cotton, a delicate silver necklace with a silver pendant in the shape of a flower sparkled.

"It's an orchid," Henry explained. "You were going to wear a lavender dress to Homecoming and I'd already ordered an orchid corsage for you when..."

He didn't finish his sentence, but I knew what he was thinking. When we got the call about Olivia.

"I love it," I said, meaning it. It wouldn't feel right to wear it around Trey, but it didn't feel right insisting that Henry take it back either.

Henry shyly shrugged. "I saw it in Paris when I was kicking around before I caught my train to Albertville. It just reminded me of Homecoming, and of you, and what our lives were like before all of this began."

I swallowed hard, feeling a little like I might start crying. It was too complicated to think about what life would have been like if Olivia hadn't invited Violet to her Sweet Sixteen party. Olivia and Candace would still be alive, I'd still live with my mom and Mischa and I would still go to Weeping Willow High School. But I probably never would have fallen in love with Trey, even though he had lived next door to me since my old house had burned down and we'd bought the one next to the Emorys' house.

"Henry," I said suddenly. "You should come over for dinner tonight."

Henry resisted, but when I reminded him that I was going back to Florida in two and a half days, he agreed. Whether we could discuss it with my mom keeping such close tabs on me or not, we had to figure out a way to deal with the trees on the Simmons' property and break the curse before Mischa killed every single kid at St. Patrick's, where she had transferred back in November. I hadn't even had a chance to fill him in on the two weird documents that Violet had insisted on giving me. My brain and adrenal systems still hadn't completely recovered from all of the planning, scheming, sneaking, hiding, and running I'd had to do in January. I had a feeling that whatever it was going to take to destroy those trees was going to get me in more trouble than I'd been in yet, and that was just too much to think about on a Friday night.

My mom seemed more excited than she wanted to let on when I told her that Henry would be coming over for dinner that night. Glenn pulled into the driveway at six thirty after wrapping up his shift at the veterinary clinic and stopping by his own house to walk his own dog and feed his cats. I sat on the couch watching television with butterflies in my stomach as the two of them flitted around the kitchen finishing dinner. For the first time since Glenn entered the picture, watching him really interact with my mom at our house as her boyfriend, it kind of freaked me out a little bit that she was dating someone. I was pretty sure that if I hadn't been sent away to the Dearborn School for Girls back in November, my mom never would have started dating again. Loneliness might have just driven her to it.

Maude ran to the front door and started barking as soon as the headlights from Henry's pick-up truck flashed through our living room windows around seven. "Maude, calm down!" I commanded as she jumped up on the couch for a better look through the window at the driveway. As I crossed the living room to pet her, the newscaster on television caught my attention.

"Local teen escapes from medium security schooling facility, assumed to be potentially armed and dangerous," the newscaster was saying. "Residents in Shawano County are encouraged to call authorities with any information as to his whereabouts. More at ten."

The photograph on the television screen of this alleged escapee was Trey Emory.