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Daphne and Oliver are in the living room, chatting. I can hear their low voices.
“How can I help?” I ask the woman who’s become a mother to me. “I know my way around a kitchen.”
“You can just sit and talk with me,” she says with a smile. “How are you doing? How are things with you and that precious girl?”
“We’re doing great.” I reach over to snatch a cucumber out of the salad she’s making. “I’m going to marry her.”
Miss Annabelle looks up at me, her face softening in a smile. “You wait right here.”
She wipes her hands on a towel as she hurries out of the kitchen. In then less than a minute, she returns carrying a small box.
“I can finally give this back to you.”
I flip open the lid and look down. “My mom’s engagement ring.”
“You gave that to me for safekeeping after things fell apart before, and you decided to pursue different things,” she says quietly and rubs her hand up and down my arm. “But it’s time you have it back. When the time’s right, offer it to that girl of yours.”
“Thank you.” I lean in to kiss her cheek. “Thanks for keeping it safe for me.”
“You know there’s not much we wouldn’t do for you, my boy.” She pats my cheek and then gets back to work. “Now, let’s get this food ready. I have people to feed.”
* * *
“I want to talk to you.” We just drove away from Oliver’s, headed back to Millie’s, and I have about twenty minutes alone with Daphne.
I need to get something off my chest.
“I’m right here,” she says and shifts in her seat to face me. “What’s up?”
“You said before that you stopped practicing witchcraft the day I walked out.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“Why, Daph?”
“Because it was tied to you,” she says. “Because I met you the day I went with Millie to my first coven meeting. And, honestly, I didn’t want to run into you there. I didn’t know what was happening—if you were staying or leaving. I knew nothing. But I sure didn’t want to chance seeing you there. I was too raw, and I knew I’d make a dramatic scene or something. Even though I’m not dramatic.”
“I never went back either,” I reply and feel myself settle when she reaches for my hand. “I packed my shit and enlisted. I wanted out of here. It was like a driving force, making me go. I couldn’t leave fast enough.”
“I wasn’t a very good witch anyway. I never did the homework. I couldn’t cast a spell if my life depended on it. And right now, it kind of does.” She clears her throat. “Miss Annabelle gave me some clippings off her plants, and a bracelet that she says was her mother’s lucky charm. They’re worried about us.”
“Yeah, I know. But don’t change the subject.”
She laughs a little. “I’m not. There’s not much more to say.”
“Did you miss it?”
“Some of the people, yes. I did. But I saw most of them anyway because of Millie. I’m not lying when I say I wasn’t good at it, Jack. I always felt like an imposter, so it was easy to stop going. To just let that part of me slip away.”
“You were never an imposter.” I glance her way and squeeze her hand. “Not everyone is super-gifted like Miss Sophia, Daph. Her knowledge comes from a literal lifetime of studying and honing her craft.”
“I know,” she says. “But it just comes so naturally to Millie.”
“And now we know that Millie has been honing her craft over a millennium.”
“You have a point. But she says that we’ve all lived through the same lifetimes. So, wouldn’t that mean I should have been learning over a millennium, too?”
“No. Because she said there were many times that you and Brielle didn’t believe or understand. It was always part of Millie’s path, not yours.”
“So, our defeating him this time isn’t necessarily linked to the coven,” she says, thinking it over. “Yet he’s targeting coven members? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Only with the aid of the craft will we be able to defeat him,” I reply and park in front of Millie’s house. Neither of us makes a move to leave the car. “He’s too powerful an entity at this point to even try to defeat him in any other way. In fact, there probably isn’t another way.”
“Good point.”
“And he knows that. So, yeah, he’s taking out our army. And that really pisses me off, Daph.”
“I know.” She pulls my hand to her face and nuzzles her cheek against it. “I know it does. We’re going to figure all of this out, Jack. One more thing about me being part of the coven... I’ve been considering going back to it. Since all of this started happening, it’s been really nice to have a close community around us. And I find a lot of it fascinating, even if I’m not especially gifted at it.”
