“Hey there,” Dad greeted me as he entered the kitchen. He was still wearing his USF baseball cap in the house, a habit that drove Rhonda nuts. “What’s all this?”

“Just trying to be helpful,” I said. “I wanted to fix a salad, but the rest of the kale in the fridge was kind of gross.”

Dad leaned against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest. “Listen, tiger. We need to have a little talk.” For a second, I thought he was going to tell me what was going on between him and Rhonda, and I prayed once again that whatever it was, it hadn’t been inspired by anything I’d done. But then I heard the garage door lifting again, which meant that Rhonda was home.

“Sure, Dad.”

Perhaps because Rhonda was about to enter the house from the garage at any second, he told me, “After dinner.”

Now I had a real reason to be paranoid. Rhonda gave me a weak smile as I set the table, and our conversation throughout dinner was shallow. Dad bored us with a description of politics going on in the surgery department at the school where he worked. By the time Rhonda excused herself and cleared her plate, I was certain that the barely perceptible hostility between them definitely must have had something to do with me. Rhonda had avoided making eye contact with me the entire time we’d been seated at the table.

Finally, while still picking at his Brussels sprouts, Dad told me, “You left a candle lit in your bedroom this morning when you left for school.”

It felt as if blood had frozen in my veins. Was it possible that I’d left my candles out? I was always careful about setting them back in the top drawer of my nightstand after I blew them out. My thoughts raced back to the state of mind I’d been in earlier that morning. I’d been much more focused than I usually was. I’d ended my call with Henry to chant the spell without distractions. I could specifically remember blowing out the candles and setting them back in the top drawer of my nightstand. There was no way I’d left the house with a candle burning.

“Are you sure? I didn’t have any candles lit last night,” I said, trying to act surprised.

Dad shifted his posture uncomfortably as if he really did not want to be having this conversation. “Rhonda found it. She said there was a weird setup of candles in a pentagram on your nightstand with a circle of salt around it?”

Iciness crept into my fingers and hands. This was a message, a warning. The spirits knew where I was. They wanted me to believe that they could hurt my father or his wife whenever they wanted.

“Dad.” There was no point in pretending like I didn’t know anything about the candles or the salt. Insinuating that Rhonda was a liar was not going to work in my favor. “That’s really freaky. Sometimes I light candles, but I would never arrange them in a pentagram. I thought I blew them out this morning before school. I’ll be more careful in the future.”