Sam rounded up a group of high school students to gather the labyrinth stones and rake the lawn clear of the scattered gravel. Once that had been done, Sarah taught Molly how to set the labyrinth, beginning with the portal stones, which acted as reservoirs to hold the actual magic. Walking through the portal activated the spell, but if someone stepped into the labyrinth at random, the magic remained quiescent.

Re-creating the labyrinth took multiple volunteers and a long, sweaty day of work. Sam showed up along with Colin and Tallulah, Bertrand, Alyssa, three students, and several witches from the local coven—Delphine and her younger brother Remy, Lexie, Sylvie, Tasha, Cara, and Lauren.

Bertrand’s husband Charles couldn’t contribute in physical labor, but he kept everyone supplied with cold drinks, watched Alyssa’s son Evan, and laid out the lunch Molly had prepared ahead of time.

When they finished, the labyrinth sprawled across the lawn as pristine as before, and Molly felt she had made friends with almost everybody present except perhaps for Sylvie, who was skittish as a feral cat and avoided direct contact with her.

Molly especially liked Delphine and Remy. The family resemblance between them was unmistakable in their regal bearing and long-limbed, muscular bodies. Delphine let her dark hair flow free in corkscrew curls and wore a pentacle on a leather thong at her neck while Remy had a spiderweb tattoo that covered most of his muscular back. Molly had come to realize how difficult it was to guess a witch’s age, but even so, she thought they might be in their late twenties.

What she mostly noticed, however, were the closed, wary looks they gave her that gradually melted into friendliness as the day wore on. By the time everyone left in a flurry of good-nights, Molly felt exhausted but happy.

She belonged. In under a month’s time, she had managed to fit in here better than she had in nearly forty years back in Georgia. There was something depressing about that, or maybe it was uplifting for what it said about the future. As she fell asleep, all she knew for sure was that her life felt better now than it ever had. She wanted to grab hold of it with both hands and never let it go.

The more she saw of Everwood, the more she loved it. It was a small town with a population of around fifteen thousand with a greater population in the swirl of neighborhoods and shopping areas that sprawled farther outside the town limits. She loved to walk the boardwalk and shop in the small boutiques by the water.

There was only one vital piece missing. Countless times she struggled with the urge to call Josiah to tell him something. But no. She was the one who had made the rule, and she needed to abide by it.

So every day at five o’clock, she texted the one word they had agreed upon.