“Where’s Astraea now?” I asked. “Do you think she knows I’m here? Why isn’t she taking care of the house and the garden?”

Marie’s face grew tight. “Astraea died a long time ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said. I shook my head, frustrated.

“What’s wrong?” Marie asked.

“It’s like everybody who could give me any real answers is gone. That leaves me in a weird place if I’m tryna figure things out.” As I went over this growing list of people who’d passed away and where that left me, something occurred to me. “How did Astraea die?”

Marie glanced at me, hesitating.

“My birth mother died, too. So did Circe and Astraea. Now that I think about it, I’m worried.” What was plaguing the Colchis family line to leave me the last one standing? The question unsettled me.

“Cause of death is tricky when you’re a Colchis,” Marie said.

I raised an eyebrow. “You wanna tell me what that’s supposed to mean?”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “It means that if I walked into the records room at the county courthouse and asked for a copy of the coroner’s report for Astraea or even Selene, I promise you there’d be an issue. It’s been moved, lost, caught on fire in a back room somewhere . . .”

“You don’t know how any of them died?” I asked.

Marie shook her head. “No. I asked Circe about Astraea, but even she couldn’t give me any real answers. For a long time, I thought it was another secret, something else she’d sworn to keep private, but I don’t know anymore. Maybe she didn’t know what happened to her—or maybe she did, but didn’t want to tell me.”

“What about the coroner?” I asked. “This is a pretty small town. Maybe you could get the information directly from them?”

“This is a small place. So small that our medical examiner’s office and our funeral home have been run by the same family for years. I actually think that’s illegal, but on top of that, the guy in charge now is an asshole. And like I said, the records always happen to be unavailable or misplaced.”

“I understand what it’s like to have questions and feel like you can’t get a straight answer,” I said. “That’s how it’s been for me ever since I got here.”

Marie bristled. “Astraea was my friend and for somebody like me, real friends are hard to come by. If I knew what happened to her, maybe it’d make me feel less—I don’t know, less lost.”