“Still, there’s one strong, brave, exceptional person who we’ve come to suspect did find the witches, who discovered the great secret of how to reach them where they hide, and destroy them. Not just the Memory Thief, but all of them.” He turns to look at me. “The problem is, of course, that she’s forgotten.”

I have a prickly feeling. A sea-urchin-in-my-chest feeling.

“That person, Rosie, was your mother.”

CHAPTER 10

An old ache, a buried hurt, rises up beside my confusion.

My mom is not strong or brave. She doesn’t even like to walk down the driveway to get the mail. She doesn’t even make toast. She doesn’t even know how to love me. And yet she has figured out the key to fighting the greatest forces of darkness in the universe?

I feel all the things I’ve missed piling on me at once. Birthdays she could have cared about, nights when we could have read together, hugs and inside jokes. I think of the mom who painted my room, the one who painted, Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness. Was she once really all the things Homer says she was? I want to believe it and I’m scared to believe it.

Germ lays a hand on my arm. Homer sighs, looking at me with pity, which angers me. I’m angry and sad and hopeful at once.

A breeze blows cold across us.

“All of this brings us to you,” Homer says. “And how you yourself are an impossible thing.”

I hesitate. “Impossible how?”

“Well”—he pauses, looking around the cemetery and up at the sky, as if gauging the time he has to answer—“the stories of you both are woven mostly of rumors and gossip. We ghosts have quite a network—ghosts meeting up in fields, at cemeteries, out on the sea, passing along information. I can only tell you what I know. But I’ll have to do it quickly.

“I know that your mother left home at sixteen to travel the world searching for witches, and preserved everything she learned in The Witch Hunter’s Guide to the Universe. And that her mother—your grandmother—had passed along the book to her just before being cursed by Mable the Mad and wandering off into the woods, never to be seen again.” He eyes me for my reaction as I listen breathlessly. My grandmother, cursed, lost.

“I know that somewhere in your mother’s travels, while crossing the sea by freighter on one of her journeys, she met your father. I know that she showed up here in Seaport after he died, with just a suitcase and a growing belly and a key to the house on Waterside Road.”

My skin prickles at the mention of my father, but Homer pushes on quickly, before I can ask more.