He didn’t want the money, didn’t want anything to do with the Simmons family name.

But Trey hadn’t turned eighteen yet the day the will had been read. His mother and Walter Emory were still his legal guardians.

So he may not have even known that his mother remained behind in the law offices that day, and that she signed those documents on his behalf.

And as Violet told me all of this tearfully over the phone the day she called to tell me that he’d died—she said that he’d never even made it back home after learning of his inheritance. Within ten minutes of his mother signing the paperwork to accept the terms of the will, Trey had collapsed outside on the sidewalk. His autopsy had confirmed that he’d been suffering from internal bleeding for over a week, presumably since he’d been attacked at Northern.

Just as excruciating as it was for me to lose him, my heart ached with the knowledge that he must have been in unbearable physical pain the entire time he was in Willow with me the last week of his life. Instead of throwing in the towel on helping me break the curse to seek medical attention for himself, he’d followed my orders. Stayed hidden at Glenn’s house. Accompanied me to Violet’s. Participated in saving Mischa.

In the days following my hospitalization, I’d been deeply touched that Henry had taken a bullet for me. He hadn’t even hesitated; he’d just leapt in front of me. But Trey had knowingly sacrificed his life for mine too. He’d known that if we didn’t break the curse in time, I would have died before the new moon. If he’d gone to see a doctor, that stand-off with Mischa and Mr. Simmons could have had much more tragic results. One thing I was sure of was that if Trey hadn’t been there that day, if he hadn’t pulled the pins out of my voodoo doll at the right moment and trailed me and Mr. Simmons up to the roof, I would have died. And the curse would have remained in play, quite possibly following Mischa into adulthood.

Of course, what I didn’t realize for many weeks after Trey’s death was that we all should have seen it coming. When I’d predicted Violet’s death, it was far off in the future, after she’d lived a long and healthy life. That should have made it clear to us that she wasn’t going to die of complications from Alport syndrome, whether Trey gave her a kidney or not. Kirsten had warned us all about the rule of three, and while we were destroying the rosebush that his mother had planted, Trey had told me about his mother’s parents dying in a car crash. Their obituary was easy enough to find in the Willow Gazzette. They’d been hit head-on by a driver who fell asleep and crossed over into their lane, and they had both died instantly.

They’d died in November of the year Trey was born, less than a month after Mary Jane had cast her spell to do harm unto Michael and Vanessa Simmons. Their deaths counted as two out of three terrible things happening to punish Mary Jane for her selfish spell-casting. I didn’t have to reconnect with Trey’s mother to ask if that was the reason why she’d left the house abandoned soon after. A little Google research revealed that her sister had gone to college in Ohio and had never returned to Willow, probably because Mary Jane had urged her to stay as far away as possible.