After the bones were removed from his garden, after Lara’s mother had gone, Ben built a stone patio, then put his house up for sale. One of the “great homes of Kerrigan Falls,” declared the listing. It had an offer within a day. Marla had been living in the house since 1938, first as her grandmother Victoria, and then as her mother, Vivian. Long trips, lengthy illnesses—no one had ever questioned any oddities as Marla morphed from mother to daughter, and no one questioned them now. Lara had helped with that. While she wasn’t the talented illusionist that Esmé had been, she’d made a correction so that “Marla” showed up to sign the mortgage paperwork. In fact, there had continued to be sightings of “Marla” now and then, until she finally moved back to Los Angeles permanently, to pursue her photography career.

Sadly, that wasn’t the only story Ben and Lara were forced to manufacture. They’d also had to fabricate for Audrey a sudden trip to Spain about a horse. After a month, when Jason and Gaston hadn’t heard from her, Ben began pressing Lara to do what they both knew was necessary. As much as Lara couldn’t face it, Audrey wasn’t coming back. So at Ben’s prodding, they created a fake car accident, with Lara using an enchanted document as proof to both Gaston and Jason that her mother was dead.

At the memorial service for Audrey, she and Jason sat on the bench in the old Kerrigan Falls Cemetery. “You should know where he is buried, too.” Then Jason took her hand and walked her around the back to Peter Norton Beaumont’s grave. It was the only indication he’d ever given her that he’d known the truth all along. That—and he gave her Peter’s Fender Sunburst. As they gazed down at the granite stone, Lara longed to tell him that his friend, Peter Beaumont, was interred at Cabot Farms, but she felt a need to protect him. He’d had enough.

Gaston Boucher had also become a dear friend. She could see the hope that he’d had for a different life for himself with Audrey. She and Ben stayed close to him, inviting him to dinners at Cabot Farms, an empty place at the table for Audrey.

Lara sold her own house and moved back into Cabot Farms with Ben, and they settled down into a quiet existence—if raising hellhounds could be considered a quiet existence, although Lara found them quite lazy and content to sit by the fire.