Did I want to know how my grandmother knew about Disney movies and what cosplay even was, I wondered. Probably I did not.

“And then you leave town,” she continued, “chop it all off, and never look back? That’s a goddess-damned declaration, Emmeline. A rebellion. Or maybe even some kind of penance only you can understand.”

I sat, feeling desperately unmoored, wondering whether it was possible that I’d misunderstood my own intentions. That my haircut wasn’t just a celebration of a new identity, but also some obscure form of punishment; for the weakness I’d shown after Gareth, maybe, my willingness to take the easy road by running away instead of building myself back up, and for the way I’d treated those I’d left behind. I could tell myself all I wanted that I’d been just a kid doing the best she could, that I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, that I hadn’t even really known how much they were hurting.

But maybe that had never quite cut it, not for the inner judge and jury that presided over my own conscience.

“But trust me, I hear you,” she went on. “I know how this place can conspire to make you feel small, if you didn’t happen to pop out with the right last name. And you’re like me that way, peep. We weren’t built to live small, neither one of us.”

“But it’s still so nice here,” I admitted, closing my eyes at the sheer relief of saying it out loud after thinking it in secret for so long. “Just, incomparable. The smell of the magic, the way the air here buzzes. The night sky and the fall weather and the sheer stupid perfection of it all. It shouldn’t even exist, but it does, it’s real, and I’ve been lying to myself for years about how much I missed it. And it still . . .” I took a deep breath, girding myself for the worst part. “Even after all this time, it still feels like home.”

There was something apocalyptic about this admission, like I’d opened the Pandora’s box I’d kept buried in the cellar of my heart, along with all the other pale and withered truths I didn’t want to exhume. As if it couldn’t be unsaid or undone, now that I’d let it come swirling out.

“And you still love it,” Nana finished for me. “You love Thistle Grove, and you love our magic—even if we Harlows did get the raw end of the deal, in the grand scheme of things. Bitch of a thing, but the way it is.”

I burbled a sad little laugh at that. “Definitely a bitch.”

“The thing is, you’ve been trying to outrun this place for nearly a decade, peep—but maybe it’s time to admit that you can’t. Because like it or not, you’re a Thistle Grove witch, and a Harlow to boot. This town is in your blood, in a way you might not even understand just yet.”

“But you travel all the time,” I said, almost accusatory. “You’re always going somewhere else.”