“I know this hasn’t been a cakewalk,” he said, voice softening. “The move here, the house-building, living in this crappy trailer—it’s been way harder than we’d both imagined.”

Harder than you’d imagined, she thought. I fucking tried to tell you, but you knew better.

“Few things in life ever go the way you imagine they will, Nate,” she said, then left him to go up to the house to wait for Riley.

. . .

Riley pulled into the driveway twenty minutes later with the Ouija board and more pot. Nate was down in the trailer, thinking about his white deer, no doubt. It occurred to Helen that she had never questioned the existence of the deer, even though she’d never seen it, and Nate had failed to get a photo of it. She filed that away for their next argument about whether she’d really seen Hattie in the kitchen. Helen led Riley into the new house and showed her the strange bundle with the tooth and nail. She’d been meaning to show it to her for days but wanted to wait until Nate wasn’t around. “What do you make of it? Is it a curse or something? A binding spell, maybe?”

Riley raised her eyebrows.

“I checked some books on witchcraft out of the library,” Helen explained. “Remember? I thought everyone knew about my reading habits…”

Riley picked up the bundle. “I don’t think it’s a binding spell. It looks more like an amulet of protection. Both the tooth and the nail, they’re used in spells to protect and ward off evil. Where did you say it came from?”

“It was left for us on our front steps our first night here. I don’t know what to think.”

Riley looked at Helen like Helen herself was a puzzle Riley was trying to solve.

They sat on the floor across from each other, directly underneath the old beam. Their legs were crossed, the Ouija board resting on their knees, fingers of all four hands resting lightly on the plastic planchette. The candles they’d lit in a circle around them flickered.

Helen hadn’t used a Ouija board since she was a young girl at slumber parties asking about crushes, whom she would marry, when she was going to die. But back then, the spirits were vague, just giving teasing answers, never really telling her just what she wanted to know.

“We call to the spirit of Hattie Breckenridge,” Riley said. “Are you here with us, Hattie? We wish to speak with you.”

Helen closed her eyes and listened to the wind blow out across the bog and up the hill, push in through the windows at the front of the house that they’d left open. All she could think of was Hattie Breckenridge and how much she wanted her to appear.