Lena looks unbothered. “If I can’t, Maxine will have a shot after I am through.”

She doesn’t say it out loud, but Finn and I know as well as she does that we are all but useless tonight. Our magic is too erratic to be relied upon for something this important.

Above our head, chandeliers sparkle, and I imagine how good it must feel to be one of tonight’s guests. One of the people who know nothing of magic or what lies beyond death or how it feels like to take another person’s life. How warm and comfortable it must be to dress in fancy clothes and have the candlelight filtered through a crystal chandelier turn the irises of your eyes golden. I meet the eye of a girl who can’t be much older than me on the arm of her handsome husband and feel the uncomfortable roil of envy.

The band strikes up a waltz, and Oliver takes me in his arms.

“Have you been practicing since our last dance?” he jokes at the way I confidently press my hand into his, the way he taught me.

“Maybe I’m just a prodigy?”

I remember the year Oliver turned fifteen, he was growing so fast it was as if he barely had control over his limbs. My mother threatened to ban him from our home, he’d bumped into and broken so many things. I can still picture the exact cornflower-blue vase that was nearly the final straw. There’s nothing of his once-incoordination present tonight. The pressure of his hand on my back is steady. He holds my hand so firmly I forget to be afraid of tripping over my own feet.

He’s so steady now. My brother would have liked this grown-up Oliver, I think. Though I’m sure he would have made fun of all his fancy suits.

It would be easy to get lost in this moment, twirling across a ballroom, flowers around us blurring in and out as I spin. Candlelight reflects in Oliver’s eyes and I ache for him, I always do, but this moment feels like a window into a life we could have had. A life where my brother was alive and Oliver asked me to court him on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the park after William ribbed him for it. A life where Oliver slipped a diamond ring on my finger in the quiet of his dorm room and my brother walked me down the aisle. I think I would have been happy. I don’t think I would have been bored.