14 Most Anticipated Upcoming Books in October to Cozy Up With This Autumn

The girl wakes up in someone else’s bed.

She lies there, perfectly still, tries to hold time like a breath in her chest; as if she can keep the clock from ticking forward, keep the boy beside her from waking, keep the memory of their night alive through sheer force of will.

She knows, of course, that she can’t. Knows that he’ll forget. They always do.

It isn’t his fault—it is never their faults.

The boy is still asleep, and she watches the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, the place where his dark hair curls against the nape of his neck, the scar along his ribs. Details long memorized.

His name is Toby.

Last night, she told him hers was Jess. She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass. Hidden barbs designed to sting. What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.

In the last month, she has been Claire, Zoe, Michelle—but two nights ago, when she was Elle, and they were closing down a late-night café after one of his gigs, Toby said that he was in love with a girl named Jess—he simply hadn’t met her yet.

So now, she is Jess.

Toby begins to stir, and she feels the old familiar ache in her chest as he stretches, rolls toward her—but doesn’t wake, not yet. His face is now inches from her, his lips parted in sleep, black curls shadowing his eyes, dark lashes against fair cheeks.

Once, the darkness teased the girl as they strolled along the Seine, told her that she had a “type,” insinuating that most of the men she chose—and even a few of the women—looked an awful lot like him.

The same dark hair, the same sharp eyes, the same etched features.

But that wasn’t fair.

After all, the darkness only looked the way he did because of her. She’d given him that shape, chosen what to make of him, what to see.

Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?

Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.

Now it is morning, in another city, another century, the bright sunlight cutting through the curtains, and Toby shifts again, rising up through the surface of sleep. And the girl who is—was—Jess holds her breath again as she tries to imagine a version of this day where he wakes, and sees her, and remembers.

Where he smiles, and strokes her cheek, and says, “Good morning.”

But it won’t happen like that, and she doesn’t want to see the familiar vacant expression, doesn’t want to watch as the boy tries to fill in the gaps where memories of her should be, witness as he pulls together his composure into practiced nonchalance. The girl has seen that performance often enough, knows the motions by heart, so instead she slides from the bed and pads barefoot out into the living room.

She catches her reflection in the hall mirror and notices what everyone notices: the seven freckles, scattered like a band of stars across her cheeks and nose.

Her own private constellation.

She leans forward and fogs the glass with her breath. Draws her fingertip through the cloud as she tries to write her name. A—d—
But she only gets as far as that before the letters dissolve. It’s not the medium—no matter how she tries to say her name, no matter how she tries to tell her story. And she has tried, in pencil, in ink, in paint, in blood.

Adeline.

Addie.

LaRue.

It is no use.

The letters crumble, or fade. The sounds die in her throat.

Her fingers fall away from the glass and she turns, surveying the living room.

Toby is a musician, and the signs of his art are everywhere.

In the instruments that lean against the walls. In the scribbled lines and notes scattered on tables—bars of half-remembered melodies mixed in with grocery lists and weekly to-do’s. But here and there, another hand—the flowers he’s started keeping on the kitchen sill, though he can’t remember when the habit started. The book on Rilke he doesn’t remember buying. The things that last, even when memories don’t.

Toby is a slow riser, so Addie makes herself tea—he doesn’t drink it, but it’s already there, in his cupboard, a tin of loose Ceylon, and a box of silk pouches. A relic of a late-night trip to the grocery store, a boy and a girl wandering the aisles, hand in hand, because they couldn’t sleep. Because she hadn’t been willing to let the night end. Wasn’t ready to let go.

She lifts the mug, inhales the scent as memories waft up to meet it.

A park in London. A patio in Prague. A team room in Edinburgh.

The past drawn like a silk sheet over the present.

It’s a cold morning in New York, the windows fogged with frost, so she pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and wraps it around her shoulders. A guitar case takes up one end of the sofa, and Toby’s cat takes up the other, so she perches on the piano bench instead.

The cat, also named Toby (“So I can talk to myself without it being weird…” he explained) looks at her as she blows on her tea.

She wonders if he remembers.

Her hands are warmer now, and she sets the mug on top of the piano and slides the cover up off the keys, stretches her fingers, and starts to play as softly as possible. In the bedroom, she can hear Toby-the-human stirring, and every inch of her, from skeleton to skin, tightens in dread.
This is the hardest part.

Addie could have left—should have left—slipped out when he was still asleep, when their morning was still an extension of their night, a moment trapped in amber. But it is too late now, so she closes her eyes and continues to play, keeps her head down as she hears his footsteps underneath the notes, keeps her fingers moving when she feels him in the doorway. He’ll stand there, taking in the scene, trying to piece together the timeline of last night, how it could have gone astray, when he could have met a girl and then taken her home, if he could have had too much drink, why he doesn’t remember any of it.

But she knows that Toby won’t interrupt her as long as she’s playing, so she savors the music for several more seconds before forcing herself to trail off, look up, pretend she doesn’t notice the confusion on his face.

“Morning,” she says, her voice cheerful, and her accent, once country French, now so faint that she hardly hears it.

“Uh, good morning,” he says, running a hand through his loose black curls, and to his credit, Toby looks the way he always does—a little dazed, and surprised to see a pretty girl sitting in his living room wearing nothing but a pair of underwear and his favorite band T-shirt beneath the blanket.

“Jess,” she says, supplying the name he can’t find, because it isn’t there. “It’s okay,” she says, “if you don’t remember.”
Toby blushes, and nudges Toby-the-cat out of the way as he sinks onto the couch cushions. “I’m sorry . . . this isn’t like me. I’m not that kind of guy.”

She smiles. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

He smiles, too, then, and it’s a line of light breaking the shadows of his face. He nods at the piano, and she wants him to say something like, “I didn’t know you could play,” but instead Toby says, “You’re really good,” and she is—it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time.
“Thanks,” she says, running her fingertips across the keys.

Toby is restless now, escaping to the kitchen. “Coffee?” he asks, shuffling through the cupboards.

“I found tea.”

She starts to play a different song. Nothing intricate, just a strain of notes. The beginnings of something. She finds the melody, takes it up, lets its slip between her fingers as Toby ducks back into the room, a steaming cup in his hands.

“What was that?” he asks, eyes brightening in that way unique to artists—writers, painters, musicians, anyone prone to moments of inspiration. “It sounded familiar…”

A shrug. “You played it for me last night.”

It isn’t a lie, not exactly. He did play it for her. After she showed him.

“I did?” he says, brow furrowing. He’s already setting the coffee aside, reaching for a pencil and a notepad off the nearest table. “God—I must have been drunk.”

He shakes his head as he says it; Toby’s never been one of those songwriters who prefer to work under the influence.

“Do you remember more?” he asks, turning through the pad. She starts playing again, leading him through the notes. He doesn’t know it, but he’s been working on this song for weeks. Well, they have.

Together.

She smiles a little as she plays on. This is the grass between the nettles. A safe place to step. She can’t leave her own mark, but if she’s careful, she can give the mark to someone else. Nothing concrete, of course, but inspiration rarely is.

Toby’s got the guitar up now, balanced on one knee, and he follows her lead, murmuring to himself. That this is good, this is different, this is something. She stops playing, gets to her feet.

“I should go.”

The melody falls apart on the strings as Toby looks up. “What? But I don’t even know you.”

“Exactly,” she says, heading for the bedroom to collect her clothes.

“But I want to know you,” Toby says, setting down the guitar and trailing her through the apartment, and this is the moment when none of it feels fair, the only time she feels the wave of frustration threatening to break. Because she has spent weeks getting to know him. And he has spent hours forgetting her. “Slow down.”

She hates this part. She shouldn’t have lingered. Should have been out of sight as well as out of mind, but there’s always that nagging hope that this time, it will be different, that this time, they will remember.

I remember, says the darkness in her ear.

She shakes her head, forcing the voice away.

“Where’s the rush?” asks Toby. “At least let me make you breakfast.”

But she’s too tired to play the game again so soon, and so she lies instead, says there’s something she has to do, and doesn’t let herself stop moving, because if she does, she knows she won’t have the strength to start again, and the cycle will spin on, the affair beginning in the morning instead of at night. But it won’t be any easier when it ends, and if she has to start over, she’d rather be a meet-cute at a bar than the unremembered aftermath of a one-night stand.

It won’t matter, in a moment, anyways.

“Jess, wait,” Toby says, catching her hand. He fumbles for the right words, and then gives up, starts again. “I have a gig tonight, at the Alloway. You should come. It’s over on…”

She knows where it is, of course. That is where they met for the first time, and the fifth, and the ninth. And when she agrees to come, his smile is dazzling. It always is.

“Promise?” he asks.

“Promise.”

There’s no such thing as witches, but there used to be.

It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash. Witches lurked in every tangled wood and waited at every midnight-crossroad with sharp-toothed smiles. They conversed with dragons on lonely mountaintops and rode rowan-wood brooms across full moons; they charmed the stars to dance beside them on the solstice and rode to battle with familiars at their heels. It used to be witches were wild as crows and fearless as foxes, because magic blazed bright and the night was theirs.

But then came the plague and the purges. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses.

Witching isn’t all gone, of course. My grandmother, Mama Mags, says they can’t ever kill magic because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything, that if you close your eyes you can feel it thrumming beneath the soles of your feet, thumpthumpthump. It’s just a lot better-behaved than it used to be.

Most respectable folk can’t even light a candle with witching, these days, but us poor folk still dabble here and there. Witch-blood runs thick in the sewers, the saying goes. Back home every mama teaches her daughters a few little charms to keep the soup-pot from boiling over or make the peonies bloom out of season. Every daddy teaches his sons how to spell ax-handles against breaking and rooftops against leaking.

Our daddy never taught us shit, except what a fox teaches chickens—how to run, how to tremble, how to outlive the bastard—and our mama died before she could teach us much of anything. But we had Mama Mags, our mother’s mother, and she didn’t fool around with soup-pots and flowers.

The preacher back home says it was God’s will that purged the witches from the world. He says women are sinful by nature and that magic in their hands turns naturally to rot and ruin, like the first witch Eve who poisoned the Garden and doomed mankind, like her daughters’ daughters who poisoned the world with the plague. He says the purges purified the earth and shepherded us into the modern era of Gatling guns and steamboats, and the Indians and Africans ought to be thanking us on their knees for freeing them from their own savage magics.

Mama Mags said that was horseshit, and that wickedness was like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. She said proper witching is just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. The will, the words, and the way.

She taught us everything important comes in threes: little pigs, billy goats gruff, chances to guess unguessable names. Sisters.

There were three of us Eastwood sisters, me and Agnes and Bella, so maybe they’ll tell our story like a witch-tale. Once upon a time, there were three sisters. Mags would like that, I think—she always said nobody paid enough attention to witch-tales and whatnot, the stories grannies tell their babies, the secret rhymes children chant among themselves, the songs women sing as they work.

Or maybe they won’t tell our story at all, because it isn’t finished yet. Maybe we’re just the very beginning, and all the fuss and mess we made was nothing but the first strike of the flint, the first shower of sparks.

There’s still no such thing as witches.

But there will be.

Nonna Maria buzzed around the kitchen in our family’s restaurant like she’d guzzled every drop of espresso we used to make our famous tiramisu. Her mood was downright frantic. My twin was late for dinner service and our grandmother saw it as a portent of doom, especially since Victoria was out after dark on a holy day. Goddess forbid.

The fact that the moon was not only full, but also a putrid shade of yellow had Nonna muttering dire warnings which would normally lead my father to bolt the doors. Thankfully he and uncle Nino were in the dining room with a bottle of limoncello, pouring after-dinner drinks for our customers. No one left Sea & Vine without sipping the dessert liqueur and savoring the utter bliss that followed a good meal.

“Mock me all you like, but it’s not safe. Demons are prowling the streets, searching for souls to steal.” Nonna chopped cloves of garlic for the scampi, her knife flying across the worn cutting board. If she wasn’t careful, she’d lose a finger. “Your sister is foolish to be out.” She stopped, immediately shifting her attention to the little horn-shaped amulet around my neck. Worry lines carved a deep path around her eyes and mouth. “Did you see if she was wearing her cornicello, Emilia?”

I didn’t bother responding. My cornicello was silver and Victoria’s was pale gold. We never took our amulets off, not even while bathing. We broke every one of Nonna’s rules except that one. Especially after what had happened when we were eight…I briefly closed my eyes, willing the memory away. Nonna still didn’t know about the luccicare I saw shimmering around humans like a glittering lavender aura, and I hoped she never would.

“Mama, please.” My mother raised her gaze to the ceiling as if the goddess of sky might send an answer to her prayers in the form of a lightning bolt. I wasn’t sure if the bolt was meant for her or Nonna. “Let’s get through dinner service before worrying about the Wicked. We have more pressing problems at the moment.” She nodded to the sauté pan. “The garlic is starting to burn.”

Nonna mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “So will their souls in Hell if we don’t save them, Nicola,” and I bit my lip to keep from smiling.

“Something’s terribly wrong, I feel it in my bones. If Vicki isn’t home soon, I’ll go looking for her myself. The Malvagiwon’t dare to steal her soul around me.” Nonna brought her cleaver down on an unsuspecting mackerel, its head flopping to the limestone floor.

I sighed. We could’ve used it to make fish stock. Nonna was really getting herself worked up if she didn’t notice. She was the one who’d taught us the value in using every part of an animal. Bones, however, could only be used for stock, not spells. At least those were the rules for us, Di Carlo’s. Le arti oscure was strictly forbidden. I scooped the fish head into a bowl to give to the alley cats later, banishing thoughts of the dark arts.

I poured some chilled sangria for Nonna, adding extra orange slices and sugared peels to sweeten the red wine. In moments, condensation bloomed like morning dew across the glass. It was mid-July in Palermo, but the temperatures felt closer to those in August, which meant the air was stifling at night, even with our windows open to welcome the ocean breeze.

It was especially hot in the kitchen now, though during colder months I still wore my long hair up because of the soaring temperatures created by our oven fires.

Sea & Vine, the Di Carlo family trattoria, was known across Sicily for our sinfully delicious food. Each evening our tables were crowded with hungry patrons, all waiting to dine on Nonna’s recipes. Lines formed in the late afternoons, no matter the weather. Nonna said simple ingredients were her secret, along with a touch of magic. Both of those statements were true.

“Here, Nonna.” I slid the drink along the counter in front of her, smiling as she paused long enough in her worrying to sip the sweet wine. My mother mouthed her thanks when my grandmother’s back was turned and I grinned.

I wasn’t sure why Nonna was so agitated tonight. Over the last several weeks my twin had missed quite a few dinner services and had snuck in well past sunset, her bronze cheeks flushed rosy and her eyes bright. There was something different about her. And I had a strong suspicion it was because of a certain young vendor in the market. Domenico Nucci, Jr.

I’d stolen a peek at her diary and saw his name scribbled in the margins before guilt had overtaken me and I’d tucked it back under the floorboard where she’d hidden it. We still shared a room on the second floor of our small, crowded home, so there weren’t any secrets between us.

I could hardly blame her if she wanted to keep just one.

“Vicki is fine, Nonna.” I handed her some fresh parsley to garnish the shrimp. “I told you she’s been flirting with the Nucci boy who sells arancini for his family near the castle. I’m sure he’s busy with all the Santa Rosalia festivities tonight. I bet she’s passing out fried rice balls to everyone who’s overindulged. They need something to soak up all that sacramental wine.” I winked, but my grandmother’s fear didn’t abate. I set the rest of the parsley down and hugged her close. “No demon is stealing her soul. I promise. She’ll be here soon.”

“One day I hope you’ll take signs from the goddesses seriously, bambina.”

Maybe. But I’d heard stories about red-eyed demons my whole life and hadn’t seen one yet. I wasn’t too worried about things suddenly changing now. I left Nonna to the scampi and smiled as music filtered in between the sounds of knives chopping and spoons stirring. It was my favorite kind of symphony—one that allowed me to focus entirely on the joy of creation.

I inhaled the fragrant scent of garlic and butter.

Cooking was magic and music combined. The crack of shells, the hiss of pancetta hitting a hot pan, the metallic clang of a whisk beating the side of a bowl, even the rhythmic thwack of a cleaver against a wooden cutting board. I adored each part of being in a kitchen, especially with my family. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect way to spend an evening. Sea & Vine was my future and it promised to be filled with love and light.

My mother hummed along while forming marzipan into fruit shapes. “He’s a nice boy. Domenico. He’d make a good match for Vicki.”

Nonna tossed a flour-coated hand in the air, waving it around as if the idea of an engagement with a Nucci stunk worse than the streets of the nearby fish market. “Bah! She’s too young to worry about marriage. And he’s not Sicilian.”

My mother and I both shook our heads. I had a feeling his Tuscan roots had little to do with Grandma’s disapproval. She didn’t want us leaving the house, and if she had it her way, we’d live in our ancestral home—in our little quarter of Palermo—until our bones turned to dust. Nonna didn’t trust anyone else to watch over us as well as she did. Especially a mere human boy.

“He was born here. His mother is from here. I’m fairly certain that makes him Sicilian,” I said. “Stop being grumpy. It doesn’t suit someone as sweet as you.”

She harrumphed, ignoring my blatant attempt to charm her, and went back to worrying. Stubborn as a mule, as my grandfather would’ve said. “Sardines washed themselves onto the shore. Gulls didn’t touch them. You know what that means? It means they’re no fools. The devil’s stirring the seas and they’ll have nothing to do with his offerings.”

“Mama,” my mother groaned and set the almond paste down. “A boat carrying kerosene crashed into the rocks last night. The oil killed the fish, not the devil.”

Nonna shot my mother a look that would sink lesser souls to their knees, begging for mercy. “You know as well as I do it’s a sign the Malvagi have arrived, Nicola. It’s been eighteen years. They’ve come to collect. You’ve heard of the bodies. The missing hearts. Is that a coincidence, too?”

“Hearts?” My voice shot up several octaves. “What are you talking about?”

Nonna clamped her mouth shut as if she’d let a secret slip. My mother whipped her head around, forgetting about the marzipan again. A look passed between them, so deep and meaningful chills crept down my spine.

“What bodies?” I prodded. “What missing hearts?”

Our restaurant was busier than normal while we prepared for the influx of people attending the festival from the mainland, and it had been days since I’d listened to gossip swirling around the marketplace. I hadn’t heard anything about bodies, let alone missing hearts.

My mother gave my grandmother a look that said “You started this, you finish it,” and went back to her candy shaping. Nonna settled onto a rocking chair she kept near the window, clasping her wine tightly. A breeze lifted the oppressive heat. Her eyes fluttered shut, as if soaking it in. She looked exhausted. Whatever was happening was bad.

“Nonna? What bodies?”

“Two girls were murdered last week. One in Sciacca. And one here. In Palermo.”

Sciacca—a port town facing the Mediterranean Sea—was almost directly south of us. It was a little jewel on an island filled with visual treasure. I couldn’t imagine a murder there. Which was ridiculous since death didn’t discriminate between paradise and hell.

“That’s awful.” I set my knife down, pulse pounding. I looked at my grandmother. “Were they…human?”

Nonna’s sad look said it all. Strega. I swallowed hard. No wonder she was carrying on about the Wicked returning. She was imagining one of us discarded in the streets, our souls being tortured by demons while our blood slipped through cracks in the stone.

And the missing hearts…

I shuddered despite the sweat beading my brow. I didn’t know what to make of that gruesome detail. Nonna often chided me for being too skeptical, but I still wasn’t convinced the Malvagi were to blame. The Wicked were sent to retrieve souls for the devil, not kill. And no one had seen them wandering our world in years.

Humans murdered each other all the time, though, and they definitely attacked us when they suspected what we were. Whispers of a new band of strega hunters had reached us last week, but we’d seen no evidence of them. But now…

“What did you mean about the Malvagi coming to collect?” I asked.

Nonna didn’t seem inclined to respond, but saw the determination in my eyes and knew I’d keep asking. She sighed. “There are stories that claim the Wicked will return to Sicily every few weeks beginning now, searching for something that was stolen from them.”

This was a new legend. “What was stolen?”

My mother stilled before shaping the marzipan again. Nonna sipped her wine carefully, gazing into it as if she might divine the future in the pulp floating on the surface. “A blood debt.”

Well, the sun was shining. They felt that boded well—people turn any old thing into an omen. It was all just to say no clouds were to be seen. The sun where the sun always was. The sun persistent and indifferent.

Roads merged into one another. The traffic congealed. Their gray car was a bell jar, a microclimate: air-conditioning, the funk of adolescence (sweat, feet, sebum), Amanda’s French shampoo, the rustle of debris, for there always was that. The car was Clay’s domain, and he was lax enough that it accrued the talus of oats from granola bars bought in bulk, the unexplained tube sock, a subscription insert from the New Yorker, a twisted tissue, ossified with snot, that wisp of white plastic peeled from the back of a Band-Aid who knew when. Kids were always needing a Band-Aid, pink skin splitting like summer fruit.

The sunlight on their arms was reassuring. The windows were tinted with a protectant to keep cancer at bay. There was news of an intensifying hurricane season, storms with fanciful names from a preapproved list. Amanda turned down the radio. Was it sexist, somehow, that Clay drove, and always did? Well: Amanda had no patience for the attendant sacraments of alternate-side-of-the-street parking and the twelve-thousand-mile checkup. Besides, Clay took pride in that kind of thing. He was a professor, and that seemed to correlate with his relish for life’s useful tasks: bundling old newspapers for recycling, scattering chemical pellets on the sidewalk when the weather turned icy, replacing lightbulbs, unclogging stopped sinks with a miniature plunger.

The car was not so new as to be luxurious nor so old as to be bohemian. A middle-class thing for middle-class people, engineered not to offend more than to appeal, purchased at a showroom with mirrored walls, some half-hearted balloons, and several more salesmen than customers, lingering in twos or threes, jingling the change in the pockets of their Men’s Wearhouse slacks. Sometimes, in the parking lot, Clay would approach some other iteration of the car (it was a popular model, “graphite”), frustrated when the keyless entry system failed to engage.

Archie was fifteen. He wore misshapen sneakers the size of bread loaves. There was a scent of milk about him, as there was to young babies, and beneath that, sweat and hormone. To mitigate all this Archie sprayed a chemical into the thatch under his arms, a smell unlike any in nature, a focus group’s consensus of the masculine ideal. Rose paid better attention. The shadow of a young girl in flower; a bloodhound might find the metal beneath the whiff of entry-level cosmetics, the pubescent predilection for fake apples and cherries. They smelled, everyone did, but you couldn’t drive the expressway with the windows open, it was too loud. “I have to take this.” Amanda held the telephone aloft, warning them, even though no one was saying anything. Archie looked at his own phone, Rose at hers, both with games and parentally preapproved social media. Archie was texting with his friend Dillon, whose two dads were atoning for their ongoing divorce by letting him spend the summer smoking pot in the uppermost floor of their Bergen Street brownstone. Rose had already posted multiple photographs of the trip, though they’d only just crossed the county line.

“Hey Jocelyn—” That telephones knew who was calling obviated nicety. Amanda was account director, Jocelyn account supervisor and one of her three direct reports in the parlance of the modern office. Jocelyn, of Korean parentage, had been born in South Carolina, and Amanda continued to feel that the woman’s mealymouthed accent was incongruous. This was so racist she could never admit it to anyone.

“I’m so sorry to bother you—” Jocelyn’s syncopated breath. It was less that Amanda was fearsome than that power was. Amanda had started her career in the studio of a temperamental Dane with a haircut like a tonsure. She’d run into the man at a restaurant the previous winter and felt queasy.

“It’s not a problem.” Amanda wasn’t magnanimous. The call was a relief. She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.

Clay drummed fingers on the leather steering wheel, earning a sideways glance from his wife. He looked at the mirror to confirm that his children were still there, a habit forged in their infancy. The rhythm of their breath was steady. The phones worked on them like those bulbous flutes did on cobras.

None of them really saw the highway landscape. The brain abets the eye; eventually your expectations of a thing supersede the thing itself. Yellow-and-black pictographs, hillocks fading into prefab concrete walls, the occasional glimpse of split-level, railroad crossing, baseball diamond, aboveground pool. Amanda nodded when she took calls, not for the benefit of the person on the other end of the phone but to prove to herself that she was engaged. Sometimes, amid the head nodding, she forgot to listen.

“Jocelyn—” Amanda tried to find some wisdom. Jocelyn didn’t need Amanda’s input as much as she did her consent. Office hierarchy was arbitrary, like everything. “That’s fine. I think that’s wise. We’re just on the expressway. You can call, don’t worry about it. But service is spotty once we get farther out. I had this problem last summer, you remember?” She paused, and was embarrassed; why would her underling remember Amanda’s previous year’s vacation plans? “We’re going farther out this year!” She made it into a joke. “But call, or email, of course, it’s fine. Good luck.”

“Everything’s okay back at the office?” Clay could never resist pronouncing “the office” with a twist of something. It was synecdoche for her profession, which he largely—but not entirely—understood. A spouse should have her own life, and Amanda’s was quite apart from his. Maybe that helped explain their happiness. At least half of the couples they knew were divorced.

“It’s fine.” One of her most reached-for truisms was that some percentage of jobs were indistinguishable from one another, as they all involved the sending of emails assessing the job itself. A workday was several communiqués about the workday then under way, some bureaucratic politesse, seventy minutes at lunch, twenty minutes caroming around the open-plan, twenty-five minutes drinking coffee. Sometimes her part in the charade felt silly and other times it felt urgent.

The traffic was not so bad, and then, as highways narrowed into streets, it was. Akin to the final, arduous leg of a salmon’s trip back home, only with lush green medians and mini malls of rain-stained stucco. The towns were either blue collar and full of Central Americans or prosperous and populated by the white demimonde of plumbers and interior designers and real estate brokers. The actual rich lived in some other realm, like Narnia. You had to happen onto it, trace speedbumpy roads to their inevitable terminus, a cul-de-sac, a shingled mansion, a view of a pond. The air was that sweet cocktail of ocean breeze and happenstance, good for tomatoes and corn, but you thought you could also catch a note of luxury cars, fine art, those soft textiles rich people leave piled on their sofas.

“Should we stop for a bite?” Clay yawned at the end of this sentence, a strangled sound.

“I’m starving.” Archie’s hyperbole.

“Let’s go to Burger King!” Rose had spied the restaurant.

Clay could feel his wife tense up. She preferred that they eat healthily (especially Rose). He could pick up her disapproval like sonar. It was like the swell that presaged an erection. They’d been married sixteen years.

Amanda ate French fries. Archie requested a grotesque number of little briquettes of fried chicken. He dumped these into a paper bag, mixed in some French fries, dribbled in the contents of a small foil-topped container of a sweet and sticky brown sauce, and chewed contentedly.

“Gross.” Rose did not approve of her brother, because he was her brother. She ate, less primly than she thought, a hamburger, mayonnaise ringing her pink lips. “Mom, Hazel dropped a pin—can you look at this and see how far her house is?”

Amanda remembered being shocked by how loud the children had been as infants at her breast. Draining and suckling like the sound of plumbing, dispassionate burps and muted flatulence like a dud firecracker, animal and unashamed. She reached behind her for the girl’s phone, greasy from food and fingers, hot from overuse. “Honey, this is not going to be anywhere near us.” Hazel was less a friend than one of Rose’s obsessions. Rose was too young to understand, but Hazel’s father was a director at Lazard; the two family’s vacations would not much resemble one another.

“Just look. You said maybe we could drive over there.”

That was the kind of thing she would suggest when half paying attention and come to rue, later, because the kids remembered her promises. Amanda looked at the phone. “It’s East Hampton, honey. It’s an hour at least. More than, depending on the day.”

Rose leaned back in her seat, audibly disgusted. “Can I have my phone back, please?”

Amanda turned and looked at her daughter, frustrated and flushed. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to sit through two hours of summer traffic for a playdate. Not when I’m on vacation.”

The girl folded her arms across her chest, a pout like a weapon. Playdate! She was insulted.

Archie chewed at his reflection in the window.

Clay ate as he drove. Amanda would be furious if they were killed in a collision because he’d been distracted by a seven-hundred-calorie sandwich.

The roads narrowed further. Farm stands—honor system: felted green pints of hairy raspberries, moldering in their juices, and a wooden box for your five-dollar bill—on some of the drives wending off the main road. Everything was so green it was frankly a little crazy. You wanted to eat it: get out of the car, get down on all fours, and bite into the earth itself.

“Let’s get some air.” Clay opened all of the windows, banishing the stink of his farting children. He slowed the car because the road was curvy, seductive, a hip switched back and forth. Designer mailboxes like a hobo sign: good taste and great wealth, pass on by. You couldn’t see anything, the trees were that full. Signs warned of deer, idiotic and inured to the presence of humans. They strutted into the streets confidently, walleyed and therefore blind. You saw their corpses everywhere, nut brown and pneumatic with death.

When Cal comes out of the house, the rooks have got hold of something. Six of them are clustered on the back lawn, amid the long wet grass and the yellow-flowered weeds, jabbing and hopping. Whatever the thing is, it’s on the small side and still moving.

Cal sets down his garbage bag of wallpaper. He considers getting his hunting knife and putting the creature out of its suffering, but the rooks have been here a lot longer than he has. It would be pretty impertinent of him to waltz in and start interfering with their ways. Instead he eases himself down to sit on the mossy step next to the trash bag.

He likes the rooks. He read somewhere that they’re smart as hell; they can get to know you, bring you presents even. For three months now he’s been trying to butter them up with scraps left on the big stump towards the bottom of the garden. They watch him trudge up and down through the grass, from the ivy-loaded oak where they have their colony, and as soon as he’s a safe distance away they swoop down to squabble and comment raucously over the scraps; but they keep a cynical eye on Cal, and if he tries to move closer they’re gone, back into the oak to jeer down at him and drop twigs on his head. Yesterday afternoon he was in his living room, stripping away the mildewed wallpaper, and a sleek mid-sized rook landed on the sill of the open window, yelled what was obviously an insult, and then flapped off laughing.

The thing on the lawn twists wildly, shaking the long grass. A big daddy rook jumps closer, aims one neat ferocious stab of his beak, and the thing goes still.

Rabbit, maybe. Cal has seen them out there in the early mornings, nibbling and dashing in the dew. Their holes are somewhere in his back field, down by the broad copse of hazels and rowans. Once his firearm license comes through, he’s planning to see if he remembers what his grandpa taught him about skinning game, and if the mule-tempered broadband will deign to find him a recipe for rabbit stew. The rooks crowd in, pecking hard and bracing their feet to jerk out bites of flesh, more of them zooming down from the tree to jostle in on the action.

Cal watches them for a while, stretching out his legs and rolling one shoulder in circles. Working on the house is using muscles he’d forgotten he had. He finds new aches every morning, although some of that is likely from sleeping on a cheap mattress on the floor. Cal is too old and too big for that, but there’s no point in bringing good furniture into the dust and damp and mold. He’ll buy that stuff once he has the house in shape, and once he figures out where you buy it-all that was Donna’s department. Meanwhile, he doesn’t mind the aches. They satisfy him; along with the blisters and thickening calluses, they’re solid, earned proof of what his life is now.

It’s headed into the long cool September stretch of evening, but cloudy enough that there’s no trace of a sunset. The sky, dappled in subtle gradations of gray, goes on forever; so do the fields, coded in shades of green by their different uses, divided up by sprawling hedges, dry-stone walls and the odd narrow back road. Away to the north, a line of low mountains rolls along the horizon. Cal’s eyes are still getting used to looking this far, after all those years of city blocks. Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.

After a while the rooks slow down, getting towards the end of their meal. Cal stands up and picks up the trash bag again. The rooks cock smart, instant glances at him and, when he starts down the garden, heave themselves into the air and flap their full bellies back to their tree. He hauls the bag down to a corner beside the creeper-covered tumbledown stone shed, pausing along the way to check out the rooks’ dinner. Rabbit, all right, a young one, although barely recognizable now.

He leaves the trash bag with the rest and heads back to the house. He’s almost there when the rooks kick off, jostling leaves and yelling cuss words at something. Cal doesn’t turn around or break stride. He says very softly through his teeth, as he closes the back door behind him, “Motherfucker.”

For the last week and a half, someone has been watching Cal. Probably longer, but he had his mind on his own business and he took for granted, like anyone would have a right to do amid all this empty space, that he was alone. His mental alarm systems were switched off, the way he wanted them. Then one night he was cooking dinner-frying a hamburger on the rust-pocked stove’s one working burner, Steve Earle good and loud on the iPod speaker, Cal adding in the occasional crash of air drums-when the back of his neck flared.

The back of Cal’s neck got trained over twenty-five years in the Chicago PD. He takes it seriously. He ambled casually across the kitchen, nodding along to the music and examining the counters like he was missing something, and then made a sudden lunge to the window: no one outside. He turned off the burner and headed for the door fast, but the garden was empty. He walked the perimeter, under a million savage stars and a howler’s moon, fields laid out white all around him and owls yelping: nothing.

Some animal noise, Cal told himself, drowned out by the music so that only his subconscious picked it up. The dark is busy around here. He’s sat out on his step well past midnight, a few times, drinking a couple of beers and getting the hang of the nighttime. He’s seen hedgehogs bustling across the garden, a sleek fox stopping on its route to give him a challenge of a stare. One time a badger, bigger and more muscular than Cal would have expected, trundled along the hedge and disappeared into it; a minute later there was one high shriek, and then the rustle of the badger moving off. Anything could have been going about its business out there.

Before Cal went to bed that night, he stacked his two mugs and two plates on the bedroom windowsill and dragged an old desk up against the bedroom door. Then he called himself a dumbass and put them away.

A couple of mornings later he was stripping wallpaper, window open to let out the dust, when the rooks exploded up out of their tree, shouting at something underneath. The fast trail of rustles heading away behind the hedge was too big and noisy for a hedgehog or a fox, too big even for a badger. By the time Cal got out there, he was too late again.

Probably bored kids spying on the newcomer. Not much else to do around here, with the village no bigger than the little end of nothing, and the closest two-horse town fifteen miles away. Cal feels dumb for even considering anything else. Mart, his nearest neighbor up the road, doesn’t even lock his door except at night. When Cal raised an eyebrow at that, Mart’s high-boned face creased up and he laughed till he wheezed. “The state of that there,” he said, pointing towards Cal’s house. “What would anyone rob off you? And who’d rob it? Am I going to sneak in some morning and go through your washing, looking for something to spruce up my fashion sense?” And Cal laughed too and told him he could do with it, and Mart informed him that his own wardrobe would do him grand, seeing as he had no plans to go courting, and started explaining why not.

But there have been things. No big deal, just stuff that flicks at the edges of Cal’s cop sense. Engines revving, three a.m. down faraway back roads, deep-chested bubbling snarls. A huddle of guys in the back corner of the pub some nights, too young and dressed wrong, talking too loud and too fast in accents that don’t fit in; the snap of their heads towards the door when Cal walks in, the stares that last a second too long. He’s been careful not to tell anyone what he used to do, but just being a stranger could be plenty, depending.

Dumb, Cal tells himself, turning on the burner under his frying pan and looking out the kitchen window at the dimming green fields, Mart’s dog trotting beside the sheep as they plod peacefully towards their pen. Too many years on the beat in bad hoods, now farmhands look like gangbangers.

Bored kids, ten to one. All the same, Cal has started keeping his music down so he won’t miss anything, he’s thinking about getting an alarm system, and this pisses him off. Years of Donna lunging for the volume knob, Cal, that baby next door is trying to sleep! Cal, Mrs. Scapanski just had surgery, you think she needs that blowing her eardrums? Cal, what are the neighbors gonna think, we’re savages? He wanted land partly so he could blast Steve Earle loud enough to knock squirrels out of the trees, and he wanted buttfuck nowhere partly so he wouldn’t have to set alarms any more. He feels like he can’t even, for example, adjust his balls without looking over his shoulder, which is something a man ought to be able to do in his own kitchen. Kids or not, he needs this put to bed.

At home he would have solved this with a couple of good, discreet cameras that uploaded straight to the cloud. Here, even if his Wi-Fi could handle that, which he doubts, the idea of taking his footage down to the nearest station doesn’t sit well. He doesn’t know what he might start: neighbor feud, or the watcher could be the officer’s cousin, or who knows what.

He’s considered tripwires. These are presumably illegal, but Cal is pretty sure this in itself wouldn’t be a big deal: Mart has already offered twice to sell him an unregistered shotgun that he’s got lying around, and everyone drives home from the pub. The problem is, again, that Cal is in the dark on what he might set in motion.

Or what he might have set in motion already. Listening to Mart, Cal has started to get an inkling of how tangled up things get around here, and how carefully you have to watch where you put your feet. Noreen, who runs the shop in the brief double line of buildings that counts as Ardnakelty village, won’t order the cookies Mart likes because of a complicated saga that took place in the 1980s and involved her uncles, Mart’s father and grazing rights; Mart doesn’t speak to an unpronounceable farmer on the other side of the mountains because the guy bought a pup that was sired by Mart’s dog when it somehow shouldn’t have been. There are other stories like that, although Cal doesn’t have them all straight, because Mart talks in big sweeping loops and because Cal doesn’t fully have the hang of the local accent. He likes it-rich as the air, with a needle-fine point that makes him think of cold river water or mountain wind-but chunks of the conversation go right over his head, and he gets distracted listening to the rhythms and misses more. But he’s gathered enough to know that he could have sat on someone’s stool in the pub, or cut across the wrong piece of land on one of his walks, and that that could mean something.

She watched. That was her gift. To disappear into the black, sink into the shadows behind and between. That’s where you really saw things for what they were, when people revealed their true natures. Everyone was on broadcast these days, thrusting out versions of themselves, cropped and filtered for public consumption. Everyone putting on the “show of me.” It was when people were alone, unobserved, that the mask came off.

She’d been watching him for a while. The mask he wore was slipping.

He, too, stood in the shadows of the street, a hulking darkness. She’d followed him as he drove, circling like a predator, then finding a place for his car under the trees. He’d parked, then sat as the night wound on and inside lights went out, one by one. Finally, he’d stepped out of his vehicle, closed the door quietly, and slipped across the street. Now he waited. What was he doing?

Since she’d been following him, she’d seen him push his children on the swings in the park, visit a strip club in the middle of the day, drink himself stupid with his buddies viewing a game at a sports bar. She’d watched as he’d helped a young mother with a toddler and baby in a carriage carry her groceries from her car into her house.

Once, he’d picked up a woman in a local bar. Then, out in the parking lot, they romped like animals in his car. Later, he went to the grocery store and picked up food for his family, his cart piled high with ice cream and Goldfish crackers, things his kids liked.

What was he up to now?

The observer only sees, never interferes. Still, tonight she felt the tingle of bad possibilities. She waited in the cool night, patient and still.

The clicking of heels echoed, a brisk staccato up the deserted street. She felt a little pulse of dread. Was there no one else around? No one else glancing out their window? No. She was the only one. Sometimes didn’t it seem like people didn’t see anymore? They didn’t look out. They looked down, at that device in their hands. Or in, mesmerized by the movie of past and future, desires and fears, always playing on the screen in their minds.

The figure of the young woman was slim, erect, confident. She marched up the street, sure-footed, hands in her pockets, tote over her shoulder. When he moved out of the shadows and blocked her path, the young woman stopped short, backed up a step or two. He reached for her, as if to take her hand, but she wrapped her arms around her middle.

There were words she couldn’t hear, an exchange. Sharp at first, then softer. On the air, far away, they sounded like calling birds. What was he doing? Fear was a cold finger up her spine.

He moved to embrace her, and she shrank away. But he moved in anyway. In the night, he was just a looming specter. His bulk swallowed her tiny form, and together in a kind of dance they moved toward the door, at first jerking, awkward. Then, she seemed to give in, soften into him. She let them both inside. And then the street was silent again.

She stood frozen, unsure of what she’d seen. Later, when she realized what he’d done, who he truly was under the mask, she’d hate herself for staying rooted, hiding in the shadows, only watching. She’d tell herself that she didn’t know then. She didn’t know that beneath the mask, he was a monster.

I look up as a man with ruddy cheeks and a crew cut walks into the restaurant, shaking rain from his baseball cap. “Hey, sweetheart,” he calls to the pink-haired girl mixing drinks behind the bar. “Any chance you can hang this in the window?”

“Sure thing,” she says, nodding toward the piece of paper in his hand. “Another fundraiser for the fire department?”

“No, someone’s gone missing,” he says.

“Missing? What happened to her?”

“Not her. Him.”

“Him? Well, that’s not something you hear every day.”

“Disappeared the night of the storm. Trying to get the word out.”

The door closes behind him as she walks to the end of the bar and picks up the flyer, reading aloud to the woman eating lunch at the corner seat. “Dr. Sam Statler, a local therapist, is six foot one, with black hair and green eyes. He’s believed to be driving a 2019 Lexus RX 350.”

Whistling, she holds up the piece of paper. “Whoever he’s gone missing with is a lucky lady.” I steal a glance at Sam’s photograph—those eyes, that dimple, the word MISSING in seventy-two-point font above his head.

“I saw the story in the paper this morning,” the woman at the bar says. “He went to work and never came home. His wife reported him missing.”

The pink-haired girl goes to the window. “Wife, huh? Sure hope she has a good alibi. You know the old saying: ‘When a man goes missing, it’s always the wife.’”

The two of them laugh as she presses the photograph of Sam’s face against the rain-blurred glass and I dip my spoon into my soup, taking small, careful sips, my eyes on the bowl, a sick feeling in my stomach.

Hannah Owens lived apart from the delusions and bad intentions of men, as deep in the forest as possible, in a small cottage hidden by vines. She’d had it built by a local carpenter, a fellow no one would hire due to a deformity at birth, a simple, honest man who later claimed the old woman had blessed him and given him a salve she had concocted from her apothecary garden that had made his withered arm bloom and become whole again. The roof of Hannah’s house was thatched and the chimney was platted with reeds and clay, with a pot of water kept near the hearth in case a spark should catch the reeds on fire. The path to her door was made of uneven blue stones, hidden by shrubs. So much the better, for the difficult going provided protection from prying eyes. And still, women from town and from the neighboring farms managed to find their way when the need arose, setting the brass bell to ringing when they knocked on the door.

Hannah knew the woods as well as anyone. She knew that counting the knots on a lilac bush could predict the number of cold spells and that if you lit a bit of snow with some tinder and it melted quickly the snow on the ground would soon disappear. Nutmeg opened the heart, lily was useful for rashes, and arnica could make a man burn with desire. When a baby refused to be born or would not nurse, when a child was ailing and feverish, when a husband strayed, when a candle burst into flame of its own accord, marking a spirit lurking nearby, women came to Hannah Owens’ door, and for the price of some eggs, or a pitcher of goat’s milk, or, in the most difficult cases, a broach or a ring, a remedy could be found.

Maria grew up watching such transactions, always after night fell, for no one wished to be seen at the witch’s door. Hanging on the wall was the Lucky Hand, an amulet shaped into five fingers, made from moss, preserved on Midsummer’s Eve with the smoke of a bonfire, which would protect the house from bad luck and ill fortune. The women who came calling sat at the kitchen table where bread was kneaded and hens were butchered and babies were born, often after a difficult labor. By the age of five, Maria had been taught how to turn a baby in its mother’s womb, how to grind a bird’s bones into a powder to combat sleeplessness, how to identify the symptoms of a fever or a pox. She had been given close instructions on which herbs were best to gather, carrying them home in a basket or in the skirt of her long apron. Wood avens to cure toothache, black horehound for nausea and monthly cramps, salted leaves that could be used to dress and heal the bite of a dog, elderberry and cherry bark for coughs, dill seeds to be rid of hiccoughs, hawthorn to disperse bad dreams and calm a frantic heart, and nettle, which made a fine soup, to treat burns, infections, and inflammations. Maria only had to touch a clump of nettle once without gloves to learn her lesson. Even after Hannah had rubbed the crumpled leaves of the jewelweed plant to calm the afflicted skin, Maria avoided those stinging plants forever after. From the start, the girl was a quick learner. She didn’t have to be hurt twice to be wary, and she knew early on that love could be either a blessing or a curse.

The women who made their way through the woods most often came for one thing. Time and time again, it was love. Love everlasting, young love, love defiled, love that caused aches and pains, love that left bruises and red welts, love wished for desperately, or love to be rid of as quickly as possible. Often Hannah wrote down the desired result and placed the bit of parchment in her spell box. She cast her spells while lighting a candle. White for health, black for expunging sorrow, red for love. Prick the third finger of the left hand with a silver needle to bring back a lover. The power of a spell increased with the waxing moon, and decreased with the waning moon. Time mattered, devotion mattered, belief mattered most of all. Maria sat by the hearth, which was hers to tend, for she had her own tinderbox and could start a fire in a flash. From that warm and cozy spot she watched Hannah scan the pages of her book filled with remedies and spells, careful to take note of the potions and powders that were prescribed: amulets of apple seeds and menstrual blood, doses of henbane that could bind a couple together, or, if used to excess, could cause delirium or death, the heart of a deer or a dove that brought about devotion even in the most feckless and untrustworthy of men, and fragrant verbena, which, depending on its use and what the user desired, could bring a man to you or cause him to be impotent.

“Remember one thing,” Hannah told Maria. “Always love someone who will love you back.”

Practical Materials

Candles.

Essential oil. Lavender for calming. Sage to purify.

Rosemary for remembrance. Rose for love.

Salt, garlic, stones, thread, talismans for fortune, love, luck,

and good health.

Always meet and depart from inside a circle.

Honor the twelve full moons in a year from December until

November: Oak, Wolf, Storm, Hare, Seed, Dryad,

Mead, Herb, Barley, Harvest, Hunter’s, Snow, and

the thirteenth moon, always most special, the Blue Moon.

Silver coins, pure water, willow, birch, rowan, oak, string,

knots, mirrors, black glass, brass bowls, pure water, blood,

ink, pens, paper.

Nettle will give protection and return evil to sender. Apple

for rebirth and immortality. Holly leads to dream magic

but can be poisonous, Blackthorn can return evil to the

sender. Ferns call rain, but fend off lightning. Feverfew

to ward off illness. Wormwood is poisonous, but can be

used for divination. Belladonna, though poisonous, can

cause visions and give the power of the sight. Mint on your

window sill will keep away flies and bad fortune. Lavender

for luck.

Hannah Owens was unusual not only for her kindness and herbal knowledge, but for the stunning fact that she could both write and read, a rare skill, for a working woman in the country was expected to have no more formal learning than a plow horse and ninety percent were illiterate. Hannah had been an orphan herself, but she had been raised in the scullery of a royal house to do kitchen work, and there the tutor for the family’s sons had taken it upon himself to allow her into the library and teach her to read. As soon as Maria was old enough, Hannah taught her precious talents to the child on stormy nights when the weather was too awful for even the most lovesick women to come to the door. They sat in the light of a lantern and drank cups of Courage Tea, a blend of currants, spices, and thyme, made for protection and healing, a mixture that needed to steep for a long time. It was an elixir that made it clear one should never hide who one was. That was the first step toward courage. In this way, magic began. The crooked black letters looked like nothing more than circles and sticks, and then all at once, after weeks of attention, they became words that took on the shape of cows and clouds and rivers and seas, a miracle on the page, drawn with ink made of oak seeds, or plant sap, or animal blood, or the damp ash of charred bones. There were sympathetic inks that few knew of; a scribe could write with one and it would not be seen until a second ink was used, or when lime juice, milk, or vinegar were brushed onto the paper, and then, after heat was applied, the message would suddenly be visible.

This was true magic, the making and unmaking of the world with paper and ink.

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