My heart thuds and I lick my dry lips, desperately searching for my line. I break eye contact with her, and in my peripheral vision I notice the guy from the counter watching us. I study what I’m guessing is a medieval confessional turned bookshelf, decorated with dried blue flowers and old books. Just a brief break from her intense look and my memory comes flooding back.

“Aut cum scuto aut in scuto,” I say quietly, repeating the Latin phrase Matteo gave me, meaning “either with shield or on shield,” and it comes out sounding awkward.

“I see,” she says after a moment, and her words are clipped.

She stares at me in a way that makes me afraid to move, like if I blink wrong, she’ll tell me she can’t help me and that I need to leave.

“It’s possible we have what you’re looking for in the back,” she says, and turns around.

My chest deflates with relief, but the moment is fleeting. As she silently weaves her way through the furniture displays, I find myself resisting following her. Something about this woman gives me an unbalanced feeling, like losing a handhold while climbing.

We make our way to the back of the store, where the apothecary takes a ring of old-fashioned keys out of her pocket and unlocks a thick wooden door. I know this is why I came here, to talk to her in private, but I’m not thrilled about disappearing behind a locked door with her.

The apothecary holds the door open and gestures impatiently for me to go through. And I do. I step into a long hallway that’s lit by two dim sconces. The walls have wainscoting on the bottom and above that a midnight-blue wallpaper with a patterned velvet overlay, making the dark hallway darker. I instinctively look over my shoulder, just in time to see the apothecary locking the door behind us. I touch the outside of my coat pocket where my phone is and take a breath, reassuring myself that I can text for help if I need to. In fact I can text from inside my pocket, a skill I mastered in school when I wanted to send Emily notes without getting my phone taken away.

“Head straight to the door all the way at the end,” the apothecary says, and my self-soothing falls flat the farther I get from the door. It’s akin to the feeling I have in dark basements, like I’m being followed and I should probably run.