But it doesn’t make me feel like less to stand so close to her. Maybe this is part of her magic, or maybe this is just part of Imogen, or maybe there’s no need to draw a firm line between the two. When she smiles, everything good in me rises to the surface and stays there, shimmering in the light. In the first second of seeing her, I want to know her forever.

Imogen touches my lips with two fingers, thanking me for what I did. Then her smile pricks deeper.

“It’s nice to finally meet you,” she says.

Haven and Imogen: Two Weeks Ago

Haven took her sister into the woods the day after Sebastian died. She walked to the hermit’s tree, the one that looked like it was always screaming. Imogen had told her that the hermit could figure out things about people that no one else could. That’s what made him the hermit instead of a dirty college dropout living in a tree.

“Can you tell me how to get her back?” Haven asked, pushing Imogen in front of her. But the hermit was staring at Haven, swerving to fix her with his long-lashed southern-boy eyes, which was weird because nobody looked at Haven. It made her angry that it was finally happening now, at the exact moment she didn’t want it to.

The hermit always wore shorts with a rat’s nest of white strings at the bottom, let his hair grow out until it was one stupid inch past his shoulders, and even then he was pretty. Haven hated how pretty he was. She hated how he paid so much attention to Imogen.

“You did something wrong,” the hermit said. “How could you do that, Haven?” He kept talking even though Haven desperately wanted to shut him up. To control the vomit of words coming out of his mouth. “You know it was wrong,” he said. “But you went right on and you took from your sister and you called up that wind.”

Haven wondered if this was Mom-and-Dad wrong or Imogen wrong. Had she finally found something that was both? The one thing they would agree on? That made her laugh. A wild sound, one that scared her, but when she tried to put it back in her mouth, shove it down her throat, she couldn’t. She’d been keeping it down too long.

Now it was all going to come out.

Haven grabbed her sister by the wrist, too hard, making Imogen sway. She tugged her down and said, through another laugh that was also a sob, “Make him stop.” But that wasn’t enough. “Make it so he can’t tell anyone what he knows.”