But Caroline didn’t push Margot backward. Instead, she wrapped her arms around her. “I’m not doing any of this to punish you. I’m scared. I want to trust you, but you make it so hard, and I just don’t know how we’re going to fix things this time. And what if we’ve never fixed things at all, just broken them?”
I thought of the coincidence of seeing Nicole by the water. I’d been having a whole lot of coincidences lately, more than one person should have in her entire life.
Maybe there had been something swirling around us in the woods that night. Unseen currents. Unseen spirits. I didn’t know if it was magic, but maybe it was more than sheer randomness. Even solid Raf, whom I trusted more than anyone, believed there might be things in this world we couldn’t explain. And if that were the case, maybe Margot hadn’t been coldly pretending to be my mother after all.
Margot was crying now too, wrapping her own arms around Caroline in return. “I’ve only ever wanted us to be better, to get back to how good and hopeful it was when we started,” she said. “But it’s gotten so bad.”
Nicole had rot in her foundation, but she was so afraid of losing anything she had that she’d tried to prop up a shakily built house anyway. There was rot in the foundation of this coven too, rot inside the cloistered walls of Nevertheless. The power had gone to everyone’s heads. Still, as Caroline and Margot held each other, trembling with guilt and sadness and regret, I saw that there was a spark of something here worth saving. If I exposed them to the public, they’d be ruined. But if I didn’t write the article and I let them go on like they were, getting away with it all while gripping tightly to everything they had, they’d be ruined too.
“What do we do?” Caroline asked Margot, her voice catching.
Miles was probably well on his way up the stairs now. Even if I withdrew my article, he could pick up the torch and carry it himself if he saw everything, now that he knew where the building was. Oh God, how could I have invited a man here, to watch these women the only time that they were able to be free?
Everyone was arguing or crying, a cacophony of angry voices around me. Nobody was paying attention as I walked to the edge of the fire, which snapped and danced in front of me. Use that anger to rebuild, Nicole had said.
A stick, a larger piece of kindling, burned at my feet. I drew it from the fire and held it in the air. Then I touched it to the ivy on the trellis nearest to me. The ivy was dry, and so was the wood it wound around. It all caught immediately. For a moment, the sound and the smell of it was covered by the bonfire we’d already built, and I watched as the flames began to spread, racing from one trellis, one tree, to another.
Then Caroline turned and saw the forest around us starting to catch fire. She gasped, and the others turned too. “Run!” Caroline shouted.
We sprinted to the door and threw it open right as Miles and the Standard’s fact-checker (a short, unassuming man) were entering the antechamber from the other side, out of breath. “Who the hell are you?” Caroline said, then shook her head. “No time, the roof is on fire!”
I grabbed my shoes. Iris grabbed the bucket, because you’ve always got to save the phones. She began to fumble around inside for her cell so that she could call the fire department, but Margot grabbed her arm and began to pull her to the stairwell.
“Get outside first,” she shouted, and we all kept running down the flights of stairs in shock, our gasping breaths and our pounding feet the only sound besides the rush of wood catching, this old building that women had been hiding themselves away in since the 1920s, a building built before the fire codes had changed, threatening to collapse around us. I hadn’t expected it all to go up so quickly and, as we fled, I realized that the flames might kill us, that my impulse had actually been a deadly one, and there would be no rebuilding at all. The stairs seemed endless. In the mass of moving bodies, I stumbled, falling to the ground as women in robes pushed past me. Overhead, the sound of shattering glass rippled through the air.
“Jillian?” Margot called, turning around. “Jillian! Come on!”
I picked myself up and ran toward her through the smoke. Another face appeared in my mind: Raf, smiling at me in his shy, hopeful way. He was the person I wanted to see when I was scared. But it wasn’t only that. I wanted to see him when I was happy and sad and all the other things too. I ran faster. I had to get out of this building. I had to see his face again.
I sprinted down the final flight of stairs. Ahead of me, Margot held open the door to the alley, and I plunged into the fresh air. Iris was dialing 911. Miles was looking at the door, frantic, relief coming over his face when I emerged. He started toward me, but Caroline charged up to him and asked, “Sorry, who the hell are you?” Some of the other women were shouting, asking one another if they’d seen how the fire started.
Margot turned to me. “You did it, didn’t you?”
