I shrugged. “Jen, if you hadn’t been there when Brandon ran away to hide in the swamp earlier this summer, Meg Mucklebones might have eaten him. So who knows?” I paused. “He has promised not to do that again, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And he’s okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “As much as he can be. Playing a lot of video games.” She smiled again, her expression softening. “He and some friends are working out some big pseudo-military strategy for the annual Easties vs. Townies Halloween battle. Something about an industrial-strength water-balloon launcher.”

I raised a fist. “Go, Easties.”

The front door opened and closed, and a few seconds later Sinclair poked his head into the spare bedroom, his dreads rattling faintly. A local glass artist who dabbled in talismans had made specially sized blue-and-white evil-eye beads for him. “Hey, roomie,” he said to Jen, hoisting a six-pack of beer. “Would you two care for a welcoming libation?”

“Sounds great.”

Okay, even though this was entirely my idea, I admit it, I felt a pang of jealousy. Sinclair looked good. He smelled good. Well, mostly he smelled like rosemary, which might just have been his weekly hair treatment but could have come from working in Warren Rogers’s nursery, which specialized in herbs and perennials.

Oh, well. I didn’t regret my decision, but I figured I was allowed to feel a little proprietary.

The weather had taken a turn for the warmer to usher out the month of September. The three of us sat on the back deck on rusty patio furniture, drinking our beers while Sinclair outlined the plans for the garden he intended to plant in the spring. It would be a combination of herbs for both magical and culinary purposes, a small but dense vegetable garden, a few perennials, and plenty of naturalized native species to beautify the place. He’d already gotten the go-ahead from his landlord.

We talked about improved home furnishings and the best places to salvage decent stuff at a good price—I had a lot of experience in that area. We talked about Lee’s offer to hire Jen on a more permanent basis as a caregiver to his mother, and whether or not dealing with a cantankerous old biddy was worth getting out of the Cassopolis family business of housekeeping. We confessed to the worst guilty pleasures in our television-watching lives—Sinclair’s was an outrageous Japanese game show neither of us had heard of, Jen’s dated all the way back to Dawson’s Creek, mine was Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. There’s just something so cathartic about the furious way Gordon swears when he’s worked up.

Eventually, it became obvious that there was one major topic we were deliberately avoiding.

It was Sinclair who broached it. “So I’ve been thinking about Emmy,” he said in a casual tone. “And I wonder if maybe we aren’t overreacting a bit.”

“Oh?”