“And yet, when he’d see the strange urchin girl that skulked around Graves Hill, he’d feel such affection towards her, even as the other mill workers noticed her striking resemblance to Vanessa,” said Professor Sader. “With two girls born to her, one ugly, one beautiful, Vanessa had kept the one she thought Stefan would love. The one who would bring her closer to him. But it was the one she threw away who imprinted herself on Stefan’s heart.”

Stefan’s scene disappeared and the girls were alone with Vanessa in her bathroom, filled with hundreds of beauty potions, creams, and elixirs, as she thickened her lips with a special paste, made her eyes green with herbal drops, and dyed her hair golden-blond with a homemade brew. Seven-year-old Sophie mimicked her mother, rubbing honeycream from a bottle into her own cheeks.

“Vanessa couldn’t understand why Stefan still seemed cold to her, even after Sophie’s birth. Was Sophie not pretty enough? she thought. Am I not good enough either? Panicked, Vanessa obsessively tried to make herself more beautiful. Her daughter too. But no matter what she did, Stefan seemed to shirk from the both of them.”

Sharply, the scene pivoted to Vanessa standing with young, ten-year-old Sophie at the kitchen window, each of them blond and gorgeous, watching Stefan playing with two young boys in Honora’s front yard. Vanessa no longer looked angry anymore. She looked defeated and heartbroken.

“Eventually, Vanessa died alone, while her true love abandoned her for a girl she once thought an ugly witch. She lived to see Honora have two children of her own. Two boys Vanessa knew were Stefan’s until the day she died, even if Honora pretended otherwise. She knew it from the way Stefan loved them. From the way Stefan held the boys at Honora’s husband’s funeral after he was killed in a mill accident. And from the way Stefan stared so distantly at Sophie, the daughter he had at home.”

As Stefan played with Honora’s children, he looked up and saw Agatha, hunched and gangly, stalking up Graves Hill. He smiled fondly.

“Yet Stefan never forgot about the girl in the graveyard, who he looked for whenever he passed by . . . because deep inside, she felt more like his child than any of them.”

The story washed away like a painting in the rain, and Sophie and Agatha were in vast, silent blackness, listening to the sound of their matching breaths.

“Two sisters,” said Sader’s voice. “But sisters in name only, for there was no love in their making. Two souls, forever irreconcilable, since each soul was a mirror of the other: one Good, one Evil. Indeed, if fate ever brought these girls together, they’d be mortal enemies, even as their hearts yearned to find a bond. There would be no path to happiness, just as there had been no path to happiness for their parents. They were old souls made new, doomed to hurt and betray one another again and again, like Stefan and Vanessa, until they too were torn apart forever. And for anyone to think these two girls could defy that ending and find an Ever After together . . . well, that would be a fairy tale, wouldn’t it?”