Lily shook her head. “No. No. I can’t.” She stepped away from me. Her white makeup gave her the look of a porcelain doll—fragile, breakable, as if at any moment she could shatter into a million pieces. “I need to go home. Alone.”

She started down the bridge.

“Lily!” I called.

Kendra rested her hand on my back. “Let her go, Theresa.”

I swiped her off. “Do not touch me,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “You are the last person I want advice from.”

Kendra lowered her arm, resigned. Humbled. I’d never seen her that way before, and that was almost as frightening as what she’d done.

“We never meant—to hurt Daphne.”

“You mean kill her?”

Kendra flinched. “Yes. But it was an accident. An awful mistake. I couldn’t change—what happened to Daphne. I couldn’t fix it. But if we’d told the truth, it would’ve ruined so many other lives as well. Our kids’. Can you understand that?”

No, I wanted to say. No. But the scary thing was that I could understand it. Sometimes the truth was too hard. Our instincts were to lie, to swallow our secrets, even if they ate us up inside. Maybe Ellen was right. Maybe that made us all monsters.

“I don’t think Ellen sees it that way,” I finally said. “She knows. She knows everything. She was here. She knew about—” I stopped, swallowed the lump that rose in my throat. “She pushed Lily.”

“Ellen?” Kendra’s voice rose in alarm.

Then she stopped. We heard something in the woods.

“Someone’s coming,” I said.

Maybe it was Lily returning. Or Ellen. Whoever it was, I didn’t want to be on this bridge when they arrived.

I quickly staggered down the incline, back onto the path near the lake. There, under the light post, I could see my owl costume hadn’t held up very well. The felt had torn in one place across my belly, and something had snagged my tights near the knee.

“Theresa, wait.” Kendra had followed me. A sly fox, tail bent and broken now. Defeated.

I spun around. “What do you want, Kendra?”

“Please don’t—” Kendra stopped. She opened her mouth, then closed it. For once, she couldn’t find words. “I’m not proud of what I did, Theresa. I just want you to know—”

Kendra was interrupted by voices and the beams of flashlights.

“I see them!” someone called.

It seemed the whole block party had made its way to the bridge. And leading the charge, fairy godmother crown perched on her head, was Maggie Lewis.

FORTY-FOUR

Kendra

Classic.

Maggie Lewis leading the angry mob to catch the bad witch. Swap the cell phone flashlights for pitchforks and torches and we’d be in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts.

As they came closer, my cell phone buzzed. Out of habit, I checked it. A text message from Bettina.