Lara remembered how stubborn and secretive Cecile could be, but she knew there was more that Audrey was hiding from her. And it was about Althacazur. “Can I ask what drove grandmother Margot mad?”

Audrey took a sip of her coffee. “It was around the time her magic came in. Cecile said she was turning on radios, lighting the stove. My mother always wanted attention, so she’d often go out of her way with mischief to scare people. Then she announced that she’d seen a man standing in the field. He spoke to her. Mother was never the same after that.”

Lara leaned back on the counter. “Have you seen him, too?”

“Have you?” Her mother’s voice was pointed. She locked eyes with Lara.

Lara wasn’t about to start confessing first, so she bent over the counter toward her mother, waiting for Audrey to reply. She’d endured a lifetime of her mother’s secrets.

When Audrey realized that Lara was waiting for her, she began to speak. “I saw him the first time when I was seven years old. My magic had just come in, and Cecile was terrified that he’d come looking for me. He did, but I told him to go away,” said Audrey with the sad, faraway smile that a distant memory brought her. “Cecile said magic had killed my mother, driven her mad. I saw the anguish on both Cecile’s and my father’s faces when they spoke of my mother, so when it began to happen to me, I wanted nothing to do with this legacy of madness, of magic. Althacazur visited me twice. Both times, I refused to speak to him. On the second visit he even brought my mother along with him.”

“Margot?” Lara realized how cruel this must have been.

“She wasn’t right, even then. Talking crazy.” Audrey wiped her eyes with her hands and tried to clear off her mascara. “I was a child, Lara. I saw my mother—the woman I most wanted to see—and I ignored her. Do you know what that was like for a seven-year-old girl with no mother?”

Lara placed her hand over her mother’s, thinking of Audrey as a little girl and the pair of them—Althacazur with his glasses and Margot with her parasol. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’d never known her and yet, I let her go,” said Audrey, “because I was so afraid of what she was—what I thought that I was becoming as well.”

“What we are.” Lara finished her sentence.

“Yes,” said Audrey, clasping Lara’s hands. “What we are.”

“And what are we?” Lara recalled the Ouija board moving at the slumber party, opening locks on her grandfather’s doors, and enchanting her wedding gown.