When they first arrived, Maria had locked herself in her chamber with the Grimoire. She attempted every spell that might bring a missing person home. She lit candles, laid out stones and bird feathers on the wooden floor, slit the palms of her hands so that her blood could call out to Faith. She cut up one of Faith’s dresses and dropped the fabric into a flame, then added pine needles and marigold flowers, a spell meant to call a person to arrive on your doorstep in less than twenty-four hours. None of it worked. Try as she might she could not use the sight to find her daughter. When she gazed into the black mirror, all she saw was a land that seemed to stretch on forever where hundreds of rabbits gathered, nothing more.

During her first weeks in New York, Maria didn’t eat or drink or sleep, and she didn’t answer when Samuel knocked at the door. Her loss was too enormous. She could not bear to speak to another person. Early in the mornings she sneaked out to search the city streets, hoping that luck would allow her to spy a girl with red hair. In time, she found several, but none were her daughter, and she came home exhausted. After a while she seemed to give up, and she took to her bed and slept for days, until Dias woke her and said if nothing else she must drink water or she would make herself ill.

“When she does come back, she will need you alive,” he told her.

He made adafina, a chicken stew his mother had often served, consisting of chicken, fava beans, onions, chickpeas, garlic, and cumin, and a sponge cake called pan de España that had been baked by Jews in Spain since the year 1000, often using potatoes instead of flour. When Maria sat down at the table, she realized she was starving. She was still eating her supper long after Abraham had gone up to bed.

“Do you think this will win me over?” she asked Samuel Dias when she was done. The food had been delicious and he had spent hours making it. He also baked a chocolate cake, using his mother’s recipe, a sweet so drenched in rum a single slice could make a person tipsy. For some reason Maria felt alive again, and guilty that her heart still managed to beat, though it was broken in two.

“I don’t have to win you over.” Dias shrugged. “I already won.”

Maria couldn’t help but laugh at his arrogance. “That was before. Now there’s a curse.”

“I don’t care,” Dias said. “I loved you before there was a curse.”