“No,” said her mother, admiring her alterations to the dress, tugging here and there and shifting the hue and fit under her hands. “You’ve seen it, though. She’s wearing it in the painting.”

She’d passed the painting of her great-grandmother Cecile Cabot that hung in the hallway hundreds of times but never really stopped to study it. Lara tried to recall the choker.

“It belonged to her mother.”

“I didn’t know that.” Lara touched the delicate strands, wondering how she’d never found this in her childhood raids on her mother’s jewelry box.

“They say she was quite famous.” Audrey smiled, spinning Lara around. “You look beautiful in it. And I do like the changes to the dress, but you can’t risk getting caught.”

“I’m in my room. Who is going to catch me but you?”

“You can’t take risks with magic, Lara. People don’t understand. What would happen if that dress began to unwind in the middle of your vows?”

“What you mean is that Todd won’t understand.” She folded her arms.

“Listen to me,” said Audrey. “There are some secrets that you must keep—even from Todd. This is one of them.”

Lara knew that her mother had always wanted them to be “normal.” Instead they were the Cabots—the famous and strange circus family—former owners of Le Cirque Margot. Circus families were rarely normal. As a kid, Audrey had worked the horses in the summers, becoming an expert trick rider, but she’d hated performing for crowds and made it clear that she wanted no part of her family legacy. Instead the young girl had taken the Lippitt Morgan horses from the act and had begun breeding them, turning Cabot Farms into one of the most successful horse breeders in the South. Unable to compete with television, Le Cirque Margot came upon hard times and low attendance, closing in the early 1970s.

Then there were the strange powers—the simple “corrections” that both mother and daughter could perform. So incensed was Audrey when her precocious daughter cast a spell in school in front of other kids that she enchanted the doors and windows as punishment, leaving Lara grounded in the house for a weekend.

Lara turned her back to Audrey. “Can you unzip me? I have to go see Todd.”

“Now?” Audrey put her hands on her hips. “It’s ten. Don’t stay too long. It’s bad luck.”

Lara rolled her eyes and gathered the dress, now changed back to its original version, and placed it on a hanger. She and Todd had given in to another one of Audrey’s old wives’ tales when they’d agreed to spend the night before the wedding apart. Lara would come back to Cabot Farms tonight with her mother while Todd spent the night at their apartment.