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“Oh my god,” Merry says.

I put the bracelet on the island because I don’t want to hold it anymore.

“You’re my witch.”

I wince.

Merry doesn’t seem to notice. She takes two steps away from the island, stops, then turns around as though she’s forgotten where she intended to go. Her hands go into her hair, pushing it back from her face, and stay there.

“Oh my fucking god,” she says again, quieter this time. “You’re actually my witch.”

I watch her pace toward the sink.

She doesn’t make it all the way there either.

There is something almost comical about seeing Merry run out of places to put all her energy. Usually, it comes out in words, but there are, perhaps, too many of those competing for her attention now. She turns back to me, opens her mouth, closes it again, and looks at the bracelet on the island.

“You made that.”

Her eyes close when I nod.

I know immediately that I’ve made something worse, although I don’t know which part, until she reaches for the bracelet and holds it up between two fingers.

“I—” She cuts herself off, then takes a big breath in and continues, “You have spent weeks giving me increasingly cryptic instructions about my romantic life, and this entire time I’ve been⁠—”

She stops talking, and immediately her eyes find mine.

I can almost see the next thought arrive.

“Dating you.”

The words settle into the kitchen.

Aurora jumps onto one of the stools and begins washing a paw. I look at her for a second because she is easier to look at than Merryweather. If I look at Merry, I might have to see the moment she understands how much of me she has already held in her hands.

“I didn’t know, I swear.”

“I know, Flora.” Merry sets the bracelet down again. Carefully this time. “I know you didn’t know. I’m not saying you knew.” She exhales and presses the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I don’t even know what I’m saying. I feel like someone just dumped two separate filing cabinets of information onto the floor of my brain.”

Despite myself, I smile.

That sounds so much like Primavera that the curve of my mouth disappears almost immediately. The recognition lands with a strange intimacy. I have spent weeks learning the shape of Merry’s thoughts without knowing I was learning hers.

How did I not hear it? Perhaps because I wasn’t listening for Merry when I talked to Primavera. I wasn’t looking for anyone. The anonymity was part of what made the conversations possible in the first place. Behind it, I could say things without watching them reach someone’s face.

Merry drops her hands.

“Wait.”

I brace myself.

Her face has changed again. She doesn’t look upset but rather… horrified.

“The list.”

A flush starts beneath my shirt and climbs my neck anyway. The words had felt private and intimate when she wrote them, but private in the abstract, addressed to a stranger who could never connect them to the body standing across from her now. The protection is gone.

Merry walks backward until her hips hit the opposite counter, then leans against it as though she needs the support.