“And this show has nothing to do with trying to stop your father’s wedding.”
Sophie twirled. “Why would you ever think that?”
Agatha glared at the fat, homeless hag, slouched in a veil under the altar, stamped Honora.
Sophie shoved Agatha music. “If I were you, I’d be learning how to sing.”
When they returned from the Woods nine months before, the hubbub had been frightening. For two hundred years, the School Master had kidnapped children from Gavaldon to his School for Good and Evil. But after so many children lost forever, so many families torn apart, two girls had found their way back. People wanted to kiss them, touch them, build statues for them, as if they were gods fallen to earth. To satisfy demand, the Council of Elders suggested they hold supervised autograph signings in the church after Sunday services. The questions never changed: “Did they torture you?” “Are you sure the curse is broken?” “Did you see my son?”
Sophie offered to endure these on her own, but to her surprise, Agatha always showed. Indeed, in those first months, Agatha did daily interviews for the town scroll, let Sophie dress her up and slather her with makeup, and politely endured the young children her friend loathed.
“Totems of disease,” Sophie grumbled, dabbing her nostrils with eucalyptus before signing another storybook. She noticed Agatha smile at a boy as she autographed his copy of King Arthur.
“Since when do you like children?” Sophie growled.
“Since they beg to see Mother when they’re sick now,” said Agatha, flashing lipstick stains on her teeth. “Never had so many patients in her life.”
But by summer, the crowd had thinned. It was Sophie’s idea to do posters.
Agatha gaped at the sign on the church door. “Free kiss?”
“On their storybooks,” Sophie said, puckering garishly red lips into a pocket mirror.
“That’s not what it sounds like,” said Agatha, pulling at the clingy green dress Sophie had loaned her. Pink had noticeably disappeared from her friend’s closet after they returned, presumably because it reminded her of her time as a bald, toothless witch.
“Look, we’re old news,” Agatha said, yanking at the dress’s straps again. “Time to go back to normal like everyone else.”
“Maybe it should just be me this week.” Sophie’s eyes flicked up from the mirror. “Perhaps they sense your lack of enthusiasm.”
But no one except smelly Radley showed that Sunday or the next week, when Sophie’s posters hawked an “intimate gift” with every autograph, or the next, when she promised a “private dinner” too. By the fall, the Missing signs in the square had come down, the children had shoved their storybooks in closets, and Mr. Deauville put a Last Days sign in his shop window, for no new fairy tales had come from the Woods for him to sell. Now the girls were just two more fossils of the curse. Even Sophie’s father had stopped treading gently. On Halloween, he told his daughter he had received the Elders’ permission to marry Honora. He never asked for Sophie’s.
As she hurried from rehearsal through a hard, ugly rain, Sophie glowered at her once-shining statue, spotted and runny with bird droppings. She had worked so hard for it. A week of snail-egg facials and cucumber-juice fasts so the sculptor would get her just right. And now here it was, a toilet for pigeons.
She glanced back at her painted face beaming from the distant theater marquee and gritted her teeth. The show would remind her father who came first. The show would remind them all.
As she splashed out of the square toward soddy cottage lanes, trails of smoke wafted from chimneys, and Sophie knew what each family was having for dinner: breaded pork with mushroom gravy in Wilhelm’s house, beef and potato cream soup in Belle’s, bacon lentils and pickled yams in Sabrina’s … The food her father loved and never could have.
Good. Let him starve, for all she cared. As she walked up the lane to her own house, Sophie inhaled for the smell of a cold, empty kitchen, a smell that reminded her father of what he’d lost.
Only now the kitchen didn’t smell empty at all. Sophie inhaled again, a smell of meat and milk, and felt herself running to the door. She threw it open—
Honora hacked into raw pork ribs. “Sophie,” she panted, wiping plump hands. “I had to close at Bartleby’s—I could use some help—”
Sophie stared through her. “Where’s my father?”
Honora tried to fix her bushy, flour-crusted hair. “Um, putting up the tent with the boys. He thought it might be nice if we all have dinner toget—”
“Tent?” Sophie charged for the back door. “Now?”
She barreled into the garden. In gusty rain, the widow’s two boys each manned a roped-down stake while Stefan tried to loop the billowing white tent around a third. But just as Stefan succeeded, the tent ripped away, burying him and the two boys beneath it. Sophie could hear them giggling before her father poked his head from under the canvas. “Just what we need. A fourth!”
“Why are you putting up the tent?” Sophie said, ice-cold. “The wedding is next week.”
Stefan stood tall and cleared his throat. “It’s tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Sophie went white. “This tomorrow? The one after today?”
“Honora said we should do it before your show,” Stefan said, running a hand through a newly grown beard. “We don’t want to distract from it.”
Sophie felt sick. “But … how can—”
“Don’t worry about us. We announced the date change at church, and Jacob and Adam here will have the tent up in no time. How was rehearsal?” He hugged the six-year-old to his brawny flank. “Jacob said he could see the lights from our porch.”
“Me too!” said eight-year-old Adam, hugging his other side.
Stefan kissed their heads. “Who’d have thought I’d have two little princes?” he whispered.
Sophie watched her father, heart in her throat.
“So come on, tell us what’s in your show,” Stefan said, smiling up at her.
But Sophie suddenly didn’t care about her show at all.
Dinner was a handsome roast, with perfectly cooked broccoli, cucumber salad, and a flourless blueberry tart, but she didn’t touch any of it. She sat rigid, glaring at Honora across the cramped table as forks speared and clinked.
“Eat,” Stefan prodded her.
Next to him, Honora rubbed her neck wattle, avoiding Sophie’s stare. “If she doesn’t like it—”
“You made what she likes,” Stefan said, eyes on Sophie. “Eat.”
Sophie didn’t. Clinks petered to silence.
“Can I have her pork?” Adam said.
“You and my mother were friends, weren’t you?” Sophie said to Honora.
The widow choked on her meat. Stefan scowled at Sophie and opened his mouth to retort, but Honora grabbed his wrist. She dabbed at dry lips with a dirty napkin.
“Best friends,” she rasped with a smile, and swallowed again. “For a very long time.”
Sophie froze over. “I wonder what came between you.”
Honora’s smile vanished and she peered down at her plate. Sophie’s eyes stayed locked on her.
Stefan’s fork clanked against the table. “Why don’t you help Honora in