“Neither one of us wants death on our hands,” Maria told her. “It would come back to us and extract a price we wouldn’t want to pay.”

Anne’s eyes were swollen from crying. “How then am I to be rid of him?”

“You have to be certain this is what you want.” Maria looked over her shoulder. Faith was still sleeping peacefully. “Once he’s gone, he won’t return.”

Anne Hatch smiled then, the first smile in a very long time. She was ready to begin.

Maria had Anne cut a lock of her hair to burn in a brass dish. This was the end of an old life and the beginning of a new one, and the transition must be marked. From black cloth and red thread a small poppet was fashioned, stuffed with blackthorn and cherry bark, and then Anne’s husband’s name, Nathaniel, was stitched upon the cloth. Anne pierced her finger in the process and her blood stained the cloth, but she had bled many times before on her husband’s behalf. The incantation for the end of love was written on a slip of paper that she attached to a candle that burned brightly.

Let our bond be broken by the powers above. You will wish to run, and you won’t look back. When I look for you, nothing will remain. You will not remember me and you will be nothing to me.

This was magic that needed words, for literary magic held the greatest power. Once home, Anne was to bury the poppet outside her front door, then burn the incantation and walk the perimeter of their property, laying down the ashes. When she went inside the house, she must dust his clothes with salt.

“This will drive him away,” Maria said. “Once he leaves, his fate is his own and neither you nor I are responsible for what happens then.”

Nathaniel Hatch was gone for a fortnight, then a month. Before long it was summer, and he still had not been seen. Anne ran the store herself, and after six months she went to the court and was declared a widow. A search party had found her husband’s boots and his gun on the far side of Leech Lake. It was thought he had drowned while hunting the sea monster, as others had before him, for there was a pile of salt near his belongings, and salt was known to call to saltwater creatures. No one but Maria had seen the footprints of his bare feet continuing on past the pond, driven by an overwhelming urge to leave Massachusetts.

As a widow, without any male heirs, Anne Hatch was allowed to own property; the store was now hers. She never again charged Maria for her purchases, whether it be molasses or chicory or flour. When there were items that were difficult to come by, Spanish oranges, for instance, or myrrh oil from Morocco, luxuries that occasionally arrived when ships that had visited faraway lands docked at the harbor, Anne saved them for Maria Owens.