Cover

Dedication

For Caryn Karmatz Rudy

Part I
Mothers

1

I woke up to see a witch peering in my bedroom window.

She was little more than a dark shape with a predator’s hungry eyes, razor-wire skinny but somehow female, staring in through the partly open drapes. Sunrise lit up the thin, silvery hair that straggled out from under her hat. I should have leaped up screaming. I should have run at her with any weapon I could find.

Instead I thought, I hope she’s not standing on my basil plants, hazy and unworried. Even half asleep, I knew that there was no such thing as witches. I’d long forgotten the most important thing the theatre had ever taught me—that the human body can hold two truths at once. Even truths that seem to rule each other out: There’s no such things as witches, true. And I was looking at one.

I didn’t understand she might be a real person until our eyes met. Hers widened in surprise. She lurched sideways and was gone, leaving me with the impression of a craggy old-lady face with a sour, turned-down mouth.

I bolted upright, heart rate jacking, letting out a strangled sound that wasn’t quite a scream. Too soft to disturb the kids, but it woke up my husband.

“Bree?” Trey’s voice was thick with sleep.

“I thought I saw someone. Looking through the window at us.”

That got his eyes open.

“A person? In the backyard?” He was already climbing out of bed.

There was a careless six-inch gap between the edges of the drapes. Even as he pushed one all the way aside, my rational brain was catching up, trying to dismiss it.

I said, “It was a witch. I mean, I thought I saw a witch. So . . . grain of salt.”

Trey was peering out, forehead pressed against the glass, but that turned him back to me, a smile starting. “Big pointy hat?”

The memory was dream-soaked, but when he said it, my brain made it so, snapping my hazy mental picture into focus. Not a cardigan. A tatty robe. Not a knit cap. A pointy witch hat. It made the whole thing ridiculous. Of course there was no witch in our backyard, staring in with hungry, haunted eyes.

“I think so,” I admitted. “Her mouth was sunken in, and she was all in black.”

I must have been dreaming, I decided. I was prone to postpartum nightmares, though not usually about anything so concrete as witches. My bad dreams after each of the girls had been almost Victorian, all footsteps and fog.

“The gate is closed and locked. Unless your witch looked spry enough to bounce over an eight-foot privacy fence . . .”

That made me laugh, though it was more of a relieved puff of air. “Nope.”

Trey let go of the drapes. “Want me to go outside and check?”