Dad and his wife, Rhonda, kept encouraging me to make new friends and “create a life for myself.” But I had to admit, I wasn’t trying very hard at that. I was eager to get back to the life I’d left behind, even though in a few small ways, I was clinging to fragments of it as best I could. One of the ways in which I was desperately hanging on was by FaceTiming with Henry Richmond every morning.

“So, what is it that you do at your job?” he asked. He was standing out on the small balcony of his studio, and I could see the sparkling teal waves of the Mediterranean behind him. Henry had been teaching private tennis lessons as one of the staff instructors at Château du Mouton d’Or on France’s Cote d’Azur since February.

“Whatever they ask me to do,” I replied. “I mean, I’ve only worked there a week, so I’m still kind of learning.”

The last time I saw him in Wisconsin, I didn’t expect to see or hear from him again. But he’d surprised me by calling during my first week in Florida. His lunch break just happened to coincide with my morning alarm clock setting. Even after weeks of this routine, I hadn’t gotten over how simultaneously comforting and weird it was to be able to see his face in real time from five thousand miles away. Mom and I FaceTimed often, but seeing Henry in France was a million times more magical. Even though he wasn’t physically in Willow, he knew that all of the traumatic, paranormal things I’d experienced over the better part of the last year had been real. Since I couldn’t talk freely with Trey on the phone, and Mischa didn’t remember the details of how we’d broken the curse on Violet in January, Henry was the only person with whom I could regularly communicate who truly understood the complexity of my life.

And although he never said so, I think he felt the same way about me. It wasn’t like he could tell his coworkers at the hotel that he’d spent his winter break chasing a bunch of high schoolers around Michigan to avenge the death of his sister. Secrets were burdens, and secrets like the ones we kept were walls that separated us from people who would never, ever understand the things we’d witnessed.

“What kind of things?” Henry pressed. “You said you’re working in a assisted living facility, and you’re in Florida. So are you yelling at people for not wearing enough sunscreen at the pool? Organizing shuffleboard tournaments?”

“No, it’s not like that,” I said with a smile. “I bring the patients their mail, sometimes help them open it and read it. I clean up around their rooms, bring them dinner. Mostly it’s just…” I paused, not wanting my job to sound as sad as it sometimes was. There was one resident, Ruth, who rarely said more than five words a day to me, but she never failed to whip out a deck of cards and challenge me to a quick game of War when I stopped by her room. At work, I was simply known as the new girl. No one at the assisted living facility thought of me as a troublemaker with mental problems, which was unfortunately my reputation back at home in Wisconsin. It was enormously satisfying to make such a big difference in people’s lives with small gestures like remembering who liked tapioca pudding and who needed to be reminded when Jeopardy! came on, especially after I’d felt like such a colossal failure for months while trying to figure out how to save Mischa from becoming Violet’s next victim. “It feels nice to do kind things for people who appreciate it.”