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"I know," I say out loud.

Seraphine watches the two of us with open interest and doesn't ask a single question about it.

"You could have made all of that up," I tell her.

"I could have."

"Then it's worth nothing."

"It's worth exactly what it's worth." She spreads her bare hands. "You'd know if I'd made it up. You'd feel the seams the way you felt a ward through a floorboard six days ago. Tonight you can't feel anything, and I know that, and I'm still showing you, because you're going to check every word of it tomorrow and I'd rather you did."

Tomorrow. She says it like there's going to be one.

"Evelyn Sorrell has known my name since I was four."

"Since before that."

"She let my mother go home."

"She let your mother go home," Seraphine agrees,"and put a watcher on the shop, and waited twenty-eight years for you to be worth collecting. That isn't cruelty, Maren. It's inventory."

Behind her, Gage stops hitting the air. He goes very still, which is worse, and I know that face. He's stopped trying to get in and started working out what he'll do when he does.

"They'll kill you," Lila says.

First words she's said since the front hall.

I make myself look at her.

She's crying and not faking it. Her mascara is gone and her mouth is doing the thing the same thing it's done since we’ve known each other. Every part of me that's been her friend for three years wants to stand up and reach for her. I hold it down with both hands.

"Mare. Listen to me. They will let you have your shop and your street and your wolf, and one day you'll say no to something, and they'll be so sorry about it." Her voice cracks straight down the middle. "I've read what they write down. They write it all down."

"Is that why you took the thread off your coat?"

She stops.

"I didn't," she says.

And I can't tell. I’ve never once been able to tell with her. And tonight I have no magic and no seams and no lie-sensing anything. I'm just a woman in a beautiful dress standing in front of her best friend with no way to tell if she is lying.

"Three years," I say. "And you never noticed I pick the mushrooms off."

Lila's face comes apart.

Seraphine lets it sit for a second, which is the cruelest thing she's done all night, and then she steps into the space between us.

"Here's what I want," she says. "Neither coven has ever understood what you are. Evelyn thinks you're a lock. That's why they keep girls like you in gardens. I don't think you're a lock at all."

"What am I, then?"

"You're the only person alive who gets to say what's on either side."

She turns and looks out at the ballroom, at two hundred masks pressed back against the walls, at Ansel standing in a doorway with his arms crossed and children behind him.

"There are eleven dead people in this room," she says. "You can hear them. Nobody else in the county can. Ask them how long they've been waiting for that shut door to open."

The girl in the nightgown is standing by the piano.