But I didn’t think that the curse had been broken. I didn’t feel any different.

“McKenna,” Trey said, his voice cutting through the fog of my terror about Jennie’s status. “You have to try to climb to the top.” Then, with a slight hesitation, as if he almost didn’t want to resort to mentioning this, he added, “We have to help Henry.”

Henry. How much time had passed since he’d been shot? How much blood had he lost? Was it even still possible that he’d survived?

Climbing higher seemed impossible, too risky. It wasn’t too late for me to fall over the edge, after all. It felt much safer to cling to my exact position, to that moment, to not take any more chances. But concern for Henry dragged me out of my fear and forced me to consider a few undeniable realities. With Mr. Simmons now dead and Henry either dead or dying, we probably had less than an hour to figure out what to do next. It occurred to me as strange that not only had Mr. Simmons come home early, unannounced, but Violet’s mother hadn’t been with him.

I had to find the courage to climb to safety and get a sense of exactly where things stood.

Trey urged me again. “Come on. You can do this.”

Following his lead, I inched my way up the roof, clinging to it almost as if I were a snake slithering uphill. When I finally reached the flat landing at the top of the peak, and the railing surrounding the widow’s walk was within reach, I fought the urge to burst into tears. Trey stood on the landing and stepped over the railing first, and then turned to offer me a hand as I joined him. Even once safe, I didn’t dare look over my shoulder at the parking area below. Instead, from our vantage point, in the opposite direction, I could see the Simmonses’ vast gardens, which stretched all the way to the line of trees at the edge of the property. I could now see bald patches of grass where Violet’s gardeners had dug up the five rosebushes that had once grown back there, and I remembered that their roots were probably still beneath the surface of the ground, their evil still poisoning this land.

We slipped back through the trapdoor and made our way down to the house’s first floor, and with each step I took, I grew more paranoid about what Violet was doing at that very moment. If she’d called an ambulance for either Henry or her father, then we’d be hearing real sirens within seconds. Sirens would lead to questions. Questions we couldn’t answer.

And if Violet had summoned her father home early to thwart our plans for some reason, then we were in serious danger, because we had no idea what awaited us downstairs. Violet had seemed so vulnerable and sensitive when she’d come to me in January and shared her version of how the curse had manifested—and she’d been so seemingly helpful in paying for my travel back to Willow that weekend—but now I had to wonder if I’d been tragically naïve about her motivation.