Her mother, Vena, swore she heard Ruth whispering to the mice that lived in the attic and humming lullabies to the bees outside her window. But no one else ever heard such mutterings.

Ruth was short and beautiful with wavy crimson hair that never grew past her shoulders, and she clucked her tongue when she walked through the woods. When she was twelve, she began deciphering messages in the webs made by the peppercorn spiders.

The webs foretold the following year’s weather, and Ruth knew the dates of rainstorms and dry summer weeks and when the winds would blow away the laundry hanging on the line.

In return, Ruth fed the spiders bits of maidenhair mushrooms that she grew in a clay pot in the back of the loft closet. Much to her mother’s displeasure.

When Ruth was ninety-nine, she became tangled in a web while walking through the Wicker Woods. She died under the stars, as silent as the day she was born.

How to Read Peppercorn Spiderwebs:

• Harvest maidenhair mushrooms (grown for nine months before picking).
• Offer less than an ounce, more than a teaspoon, to peppercorn spider.
• Sleep in soil beneath web for one night. Wait for dew to settle on silk strands.
• Remain silent, careful not to tear web. Decipher forecast for following season.

OLIVER

It was different before. Before I remembered.

They weren’t lies then, but now they are.

Sprinting across the frozen lake, pulling her up from the water, I felt the sting of that other awful night. Like a brick sinking into my stomach, I remembered what happened.

The cemetery was only the beginning. What came later was the end. The lake and my hands around Max’s throat. The others shouting from shore.

I never should have been there.

It’s not a thousand little lies that amount to nothing. It’s one large lie, so big it will swallow me up. And it will destroy her.

Tonight, with my hands against her skin and my face in her hair, I know I will hurt her. If not by sunrise, eventually. Soon enough she will look at me with sharp, serrated fear in her eyes. She will look and know what I am.

So I hold it inside for as long as I can. I lie beside her, our fingers knitted together, and I pretend it will stay this way forever. Because she is all that roots me here. The only thing that blots out the feeling of the cold forest inside me. The only cure for the dark I can’t escape. She is long auburn eyelashes and little white half-moons on her fingernails and a voice that always sounds like an incantation.

And she just might be a witch.

So I kiss her temple where she sleeps, her breath a tiny sputter of air. Because I know this won’t last.

There is no escaping what comes next.

But for now I let her sleep.