Wife. That’s all Sophie heard. Not thief. Not tramp. Wife.
“After the wedding and the show is over,” he added. “Get you settled into normal life.”
Sophie spun to Honora, expecting her to be as shocked, but she was just anxiously slurping cucumbers through dry lips.
“Father, you want me to—to—” Sophie couldn’t get words out. “Churn b-b-butter?”
“Build some strength in those stick arms,” her father said between bites, as Jacob and Adam compared biceps.
“But I’m famous!” Sophie shrieked. “I have fans—I have a statue! I can’t work! Not with her!”
“Then perhaps you should find somewhere else to live.” Stefan picked a bone clean. “As long as you’re in this family, you’ll contribute. Or the boys would be happy to have your room.”
Sophie gasped.
“Now eat,” he spat, so sharply she had to obey.
As he watched Agatha slip on her old, saggy black dress, Reaper growled suspiciously, sucking on a few trout bones across the leaky room.
“See? Same old Agatha.” She slammed the trunk on Sophie’s borrowed clothes, slid it near the door, and kneeled to pet her bald, wrinkled cat. “So now you can be nice again.”
Reaper hissed.
“It’s me,” Agatha said, trying to pet him. “I haven’t changed a bit.”
Reaper scratched her and trundled away.
Agatha rubbed the fresh mark on her hand between others barely healed. She flopped onto her bed while Reaper curled up in a moldy green corner, as far away from her as he could.
She rolled over and hugged her pillow.
I’m happy.
She listened to rain slosh against the straw roof and spurt through a hole into her mother’s black cauldron.
Home sweet home.
Clink, clink, clink went the rain.
Sophie and me.
She stared at the blank, cracked wall. Clink, clink, clink … Like a sword in a sheath, rubbing against a belt buckle. Clink, clink, clink. Her chest started pounding, her blood burning like lava, and she knew it was happening again. Clink, clink, clink. The black of the cauldron became the black of his boots. The straw of the ceiling, the gold of his hair. The sky through the window, the blue in his eyes. In her arms, the pillow became tanned muscles and flesh—
“Some help, dear!” a voice trilled.
Agatha jolted awake, gripping her sweat-stained pillow. She lurched off the bed and opened the door to see her mother lugging two baskets, one teeming with stinky roots and leaves, the other with dead tadpoles, cockroaches, and lizards.
“What in the world—”
“So you can finally teach me some potions from school!” Callis chimed, eyes bulging, and plunked a basket in Agatha’s hands. “Not as many patients today. We have time to brew!”
“I told you I can’t do magic anymore,” Agatha snapped, closing the door behind them. “Our fingers don’t glow here.”
“Why won’t you tell me anything that happened?” her mother asked, picking her oily dome of black hair. “The least you could do is show me a wart potion.”
“Look, I put it all behind me.”
“Lizards are better fresh, dear. What can we make with those?”
“I forgot all that stuff—”
“They’ll go bad—”
“Stop!”
Her mother stiffened.
“Please,” Agatha begged. “I don’t want to talk about school.”
Gently Callis took the basket from her. “When you came home, I’d never been so happy.” She looked into her daughter’s eyes. “But part of me worries what you gave up.”
Agatha stared down at her black clump shoes as her mother towed the baskets into the kitchen. “You know how I feel about waste,” Callis sighed. “Let’s hope our bowels can handle a lizard stew.”
As Agatha chopped onions by torchlight, she listened to her mother hum off-key, like she did every night. Once upon a time, she had loved their graveyard haven, their lonely routines.
She put down the knife. “Mother, how do you know if you’ve found Ever After?”
“Hmmm?” said Callis, bony hands scraping a few roaches into the cauldron.
“The people in a fairy tale, I mean.”
“It should say so, dear.” Her mother nodded at an open storybook peeking from under Agatha’s bed.
Agatha looked down at its last page, a blond prince and raven-haired princess kissing at their wedding, framed by an enchanted castle …
THE END.
“But what if two people can’t see their storybook?” She gazed at the princess in her prince’s arms. “How do they know if they’re happy?”
“If they have to ask, they probably aren’t,” said her mother, jabbing a roach that wouldn’t drown.
Agatha’s eyes stayed on the prince a moment longer. She snapped the storybook shut and tossed it in the fire under the cauldron. “About time we got rid of these like everyone else.”
She resumed chopping in the corner, faster than before.
“Are you all right, dear?” Callis said, hearing sniffles.
Agatha dabbed at her eyes. “Onions.”
The rain had gone, but a harsh autumn wind raked across the cemetery, lit by two torches over the gates that clung to skipping flames. As she approached the grave, her calves locked and her heart banged in her ears, begging her to stay away. Sweat seeped down her back as she kneeled in the weeds and mud, her eyes closed. She had never looked. Never.
With a deep breath, Sophie opened her eyes. She could barely make out an eroded butterfly in the headstone above the words.
Two smaller gravestones, both unmarked, flanked her mother’s like wings. Fingers covered by white mittens, she picked moss out of the cracks in one, overgrown from the years of neglect. As she tore away the mold, her soiled mittens found deeper grooves in the rock, smooth and deliberate. There was something carved in the slab. She peered closer—
“Sophie?”
She turned to see Agatha approach in a tattered black coat, balancing a drippy candle on a saucer.
“My mother saw you from the window.”
Agatha crouched next to her and laid the flame in front of the graves. Sophie didn’t say anything for a long while.
“He thought it was her fault,” she said at last, gazing at the two unmarked headstones. “Two boys, both born dead. How else could he explain it?” She watched a blue butterfly flutter out of the darkness and nestle into the carving on her mother’s decayed gravestone.
“All the doctors said she couldn’t have more children. Even your mother.” Sophie paused and smiled faintly at the blue butterfly. “One day it happened. She was so sick no one thought it could last, but her belly still grew. The Miracle Child, the Elders called it. Father