The story actually began, as many stories do, far, far earlier than most people cared to remember, with another girl. Her name was Sophronia.

Sophronia and her mother, Hanna, lived in a one-room house on the outskirts of town, her father a man who came in and out of her and Hanna’s lives as quickly and devastatingly as the unexpected storms that sometimes hit their coastal town.

In between storms, their home was an island, a place of refuge and secret, where a townsperson could knock if a family member had a fever that wouldn’t break, or a bone that wouldn’t mend, and the old ways came as naturally to Sophronia as they had to Hanna. On full moons Hanna often found Sophronia’s bed empty, her daughter standing outside under the moon or at the ocean’s hemline, her fingers skating through the water.

Sophronia’s mother was not alarmed by any of her daughter’s midnight wanderings. What alarmed her was this: Sophronia was undeniably beautiful. Her eyes were dark and bright, her cheeks tinged with pink, and it didn’t take long before the rest of town began to take notice. Sophronia’s mother warned her to be careful, but Sophronia only laughed. She’d only ever cared about one gaze, and it called to her even more strongly than the waxing tides and rising moons. His name was Frederick Bell.

Frederick was a few years older than Sophronia, artistic and ambitious, with a red beard and a bad habit of not speaking up when he needed to. But Sophronia was in love. She didn’t care about the rumors she’d heard of his upcoming nuptials to a girl from a prominent Salem family. Moonlight has a way of illuminating only the things you want to see, and she was happy to see forever in the moon’s waning light.

Her mother tried to warn her, tried to tell her what happened when women like them tried to chart their own courses, but Sophronia didn’t believe Frederick would betray her, could betray her, right up until the moment that he did.

On the day Frederick married Abigail Archer, Sophronia locked herself in her mother’s cabin, away from the water, the town, the moonlight, and in the cabin’s harsh candlelight, she was finally able to admit what Hanna already suspected. She was pregnant. Nine months later, Sophronia gave birth to a small strawberry-headed girl who she named Thalia.

Across town, another redheaded baby girl was born just eleven days later, but under such a different set of stars, she may as well have been on the other side of the world. Lily was born into a resplendent house, the family gathered to witness the first birth. Only the baby’s father, Frederick, was absent. He was out to sea on his first spice trade, his ship named for the dowry that would be the beginning of his fleet. The Abigail.

Afterward, Abigail sat alone with Lily, promising herself and her new daughter that the sketches she’d found hidden in her husband’s study of a young woman with dark eyes and rosy cheeks would never harm them. She knew Frederick didn’t love her, but she didn’t need love, she needed safety. Life in their New England town had never been easy, even for someone with a comfortable house and a large dowry, and in many ways her life had been similar to Sophronia’s. Abigail’s father had always had a wandering eye, and behind closed doors, a violent temper, and she’d grown up with her mother whispering in her ear. You must take your power where you can get it. Protect your family’s reputation at all costs.

The years progressed, and one chilly autumn evening, Hanna went to sleep and never woke up, leaving Sophronia alone to care for young Thalia in their small cabin on the outskirts of town.

Sophronia knew it cast suspicion on her, the work she did in her small cabin, and she tried to keep Thalia from learning the things that had come so easily to her: potions, spells, how to mix valerian root with honey, words to mend an argument, but Thalia took to it as naturally as breathing. It was in their blood, and she couldn’t be stopped from learning.

Sophronia also tried to shield Thalia from the Bell family house, from the luxuries and privileges that in another life, under different stars, could have been hers, but she was unsuccessful at that as well. From the very first moment Lily and Thalia caught glimpses of each other across the town’s muddy main street, they were drawn to each other like moths to flames. At primary school they sat with their red heads bent close together; at church they held silent conversations across the pews, needing only their eyes and a few head tilts to tell entire stories. They loved to walk down the street together, their arms linked, their step so alike that if anyone had cared to look for it, they would have seen the truth.

If it had merely been a friendship, perhaps they could have been kept apart, but sisters, even half sisters, were different. Their souls had been patterned from the same materials. No matter how many times they were warned by their mothers, no matter how they were coaxed or threatened or punished, whenever one of them went missing, their mother knew she was with the other.

Thalia was the one who taught Lily how to grow her gardens. She showed her how to sift the soil, how to listen to the plants with her hands, how to ask the seeds where they wanted to be planted, and the two of them passed every minute they could together, hands locked under drooping calla lilies and star-studded jasmine, fragrant peonies tucked behind their ears.

The friendship frightened Abigail, but it destroyed Sophronia. She never got used to the sensation of seeing those two girls together, one in a tattered dress with bare feet, the other in lace and ribbons. She began having nightmares and headaches, her feet retracing the moonlit walks of her youth. Some nights she woke up on the edge of the ocean, having sleepwalked to the place where she’d once met Thalia’s father. Once she woke on the Bells’ doorstep. The night after Thalia’s fourteenth birthday, Sophronia left their cabin in the darkness of a new moon and never came back. A sailor stopping in at the port would later claim to have seen her walking out into the ocean, her white nightdress spreading out around her in a plume. He’d believed she was a sprite, a water witch. Not a real woman who might need his help. In a moment she was gone.

Find Abigail.