new crown from the jumble of things I hadn’t unpacked from the weekend, I owned the words the next time they issued from my mouth.

This. Is. My. House.

I giggled and wedged the crown more securely atop my head. Forty-one years old and still playing dress-up.

Bear fur. Big fish. The trunk with my mother’s things was in my office. I kneeled in front of the dusty thing, lifted the top section of the latch and the lid, and surveyed the contents before I pawed through them.

There! I parted two stacks of pinned-together quilting squares and felt for my mother’s Witchling sash, the one I’d seen her wearing proudly in photographs displayed on my aunt’s mantle. I smoothed the faded fabric, straightened the rows of round, enameled pins, and brought the entire thing into the kitchen.

I snapped a photograph so I wouldn’t forget the order in which the pins were arranged; I had no idea if it made a difference or not. I didn’t know if the Witchling Way still even existed; my aunt had signed me up for the human counterpart, the Canadian Girl Guides. But the once-colorful pins were grimy, and I wanted to wash and polish them and imagine my mother’s pride as she worked toward collecting as many as possible.

Because the sash was so filled with round reminders of magical milestones, I decided my mother would have been the accomplishing kind—maybe even a little competitive—and she would have placed each pin onto her sash very, very carefully.

There were creatures on the buttons, along with trees, leaves, and flowers; esoteric symbols; and tools of the magic trade.

Three pins kept rolling away from my cleaning operation: a bear, a seal, and an apple.

I dried the pins, stashed them in an empty sweetgrass basket, and placed the basket and the sash in the trunk. The three errant buttons stayed in my palm until I placed them on the altar in my bedroom, next to the branchlet from the old crabapple tree. I slipped the crown off my head and placed it on the altar with my new wand and the three pins inside its circumference.

What was I doing? I glanced at what little I could see of my reflection in the mercury glass mirror. Its usefulness had ended decades ago, but my aunt and my mother and maybe other female relatives, other witches in my lineage, had searched its oxidized surface for signs of their own hidden beauties or latent skills.

Pressing my palm to the cool glass, I whispered the words again: This is my house and then added, And I am yours.

Chapter 19

A car pulled into the driveway, fast, splattering gravel. I made it to the end of the hallway as Tanner peered in the front door and jiggled the handle.

“I’m here,” I called, waving. “I’m here.” I flicked the lock and pulled the door open. The screen door that had taken the brunt of Doug’s flight was leaning against the side of the house.

“I can fix that,” he said, giving the splintered frame a glance before stepping over the threshold. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Very.” I took a couple steps back, my at-home dress swirling around my lower legs.

Tanner was suddenly next to me, wrapping one of his hands around the back of my neck and clutching me against him.

“I was worried about you,” he said, his words muffled by my hair.

He kissed the side of my head, his thumb rubbing the back of my skull.

“I locked the house tight, even the windows.” Barefooted, I closed my eyes and rooted down, and down further, searching for her presence.

“I was still worried.”

Nothing. I opened my eyes, caught the green light of the reinforced wards draped like emerald-dusted netting over the trees.

“I don’t feel her below, Tanner, but the wards. They’re shimmering again.”

“Those are the new wards settling in with the old ones,” he said. “I threw them a little test on the way in.”

Tanner wore a faded cowboy-style shirt, the kind with snaps for closures. The fabric was so soft it barely provided coverage between his chest and my cheek. I hadn’t moved closer on purpose; Tanner’s hand was the likely culprit. He was still cupping my head, massaging me with his thumb, and whether I was aware of it or not, I had taken it as an invitation.

“The lights are beautiful,” I said, letting my curves find their resting places along his more angular planes. I liked that Tanner wasn’t overly muscled, at least when he was being regular Tanner, not extremely angry or irritated Tanner.

“I could kiss you right now.” The wards are up. The boys won’t be home until close to seven.

“Then do it,” Tanner murmured. “Kiss me, Calliope.”

All I had to do was pivot on the balls of my toes and lift my heels.

Tires on gravel and the thump-thump of loud music behind closed windows alerted us another car was pulling into the driveway. I planted a kiss on Tanner’s mouth, and he held me in place until every possible inch of our bodies that could touch…touched.

“That wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said.

“Me, either.” I lowered my heels to the floor.

Tanner slipped by me and headed down the hall. I stepped out to greet my sons.

“Cool wards, Mom,” Thatcher yelled.

Harper and Thatch were standing to either side of the Jeep, extracting whatever goodies they’d picked up from working at the farm and helping out at the market. They each hefted a box, slammed the Jeep’s doors shut, and tromped up the stairs, leaving little rectangular clumps of dirt in their wake.

I didn’t have to remind them to leave the boots and boxes on the deck and hose down whatever they’d hauled home. They were on it.

“Not the pies!” Thatch laughed. He handed over two familiar white boxes with red lettering. One oozed fruit juice along a bottom seam. “Sallie gave us a broken blueberry pie. And we bought a strawberry rhubarb.”

I took care of getting the dessert into the house. Tanner had seated himself

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