Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
I was two-thirds of the way through Chapter Four of When the Veil Thins and trying very hard to pretend the dead woman in my peripheral vision wasn’t reading over my shoulder.
The cottage was quiet for the first time in days.
The coven had left the night before, taking their wine glasses and their warmth and Jill’s twelve-pack of paper napkins with them, and the silence they’d left behind wasn’t the bad kind anymore.
It was the kind of silence that happens when a space has been filled up and is still holding the shape of it.
Nick’s popsicle-stick star sat on the mantle.
My grandmother’s recipe tin gleamed on the counter next to Aunt Amelia’s herbs, brass and battered and smelling like Sunday dinner at a house that didn’t exist anymore.
I’d woken up that morning and made coffee in a kitchen that looked like someone lived in it. That someone being me. It was a strange feeling. Good-strange, but strange.
So I’d done the thing I’d been putting off.
I pulled Amelia’s book off the shelf—the real one, When the Veil Thins: A Practical Guide, not the beginner stuff Lori had mentioned at the coffee shop—and sat down on the couch with a pen and a notebook like I was back in college, which was thirty years ago and a different life entirely, but the muscle memory of studying was still in there somewhere, buried under decades of grocery lists and school permission slips.
The book was dense. Amelia had annotated it in the margins, her handwriting small and slanted, and some of the notes were practical (try lavender oil on the temples) and some were personal (M.
appeared again today, angry, won’t say why) and some were just single words circled and underlined: Boundaries. Control. Patience.
Patience. Sure. I’d get right on that.
“You are reading too slowly,” Rosaria said.
She’d materialized in the glass front of the bookcase about twenty minutes ago and had been providing unsolicited commentary ever since. Her reflection was slightly distorted by the curve of the glass, which made her look wider than she’d been in life. I was petty enough to enjoy that.
“I’m taking notes.”
“You are drawing circles around words. That is not notes. That is doodling.” She peered at the book from her glass prison. “What chapter are you on?”
“Four. ‘Establishing Boundaries with Persistent Spirits.’” I held it up so she could see the title. “Seemed relevant.”
“Hilarious. Skip to Chapter Seven. ‘Communication with the Newly Deceased.’ That is the one that matters.”
“Chapter Four matters. You’re the reason Chapter Four matters.”
“I am the reason you have a purpose, Gina. You should be thanking me.”
I turned a page with more force than was strictly necessary and kept reading.
The section on boundaries was actually useful—it talked about visualization techniques, about imagining your ability as a space you controlled, a room with doors you could open and close.
The medium must learn to choose when the door is open, Amelia had written in the margin. Otherwise they will never sleep again.
Underlined three times. Poor Amelia.
I closed my eyes. Tried the exercise. Pictured a room—my living room, because I was sitting in it and creativity wasn’t my strong suit at the moment. Pictured a door. Pictured closing it.
Nothing happened. Or rather, everything happened—I could still feel Rosaria’s cold presence from the bookcase, still sense the faint hum of something else beyond the walls of the cottage, like a radio station just out of range.
The book said the “thinning” was always present in Starfall Bay, that the geography made the barrier permeable.
It compared mediums to people with excellent hearing living next to a highway.
You could learn to tune it out. But it was always there.
“You are scrunching your face,” Rosaria said. “You look constipated.”
I opened my eyes. “I’m trying to practice.”
“Practice what? You sat there with your eyes closed for forty-five seconds and accomplished nothing. Your aunt would have been appalled.”
“My aunt left notes in this book about it taking years to learn control. Years, Rosaria.”
“We do not have years. We have a murderer who is free and a family that is falling apart and you are sitting on a couch doing breathing exercises.” Her reflection drew itself up to its full spectral height. “Priorities.”
“My priority right now is figuring out how to turn you off.”
“You cannot turn me off. I am not a television.”
“More’s the pity.”
She huffed and disappeared. Not gone—I could feel her somewhere in the house, probably sulking in the bathroom mirror where she’d first appeared, nursing her grudge in the spot where all this had started.
I went back to the book. Found a passage I hadn’t noticed before, near the end of the chapter:
Ghosts who are anchored by violent or sudden death often carry a double burden: the unfinished business of how they died, and the unfinished business of how they lived.
The medium should be attentive to both. Resolving the circumstances of death may not be sufficient if the spirit has unresolved emotional attachments that predate the death event.
I read it twice. Picked up my pen. Wrote in the margin, next to Amelia’s notes: Rosaria??
Because Rosaria had unfinished business with everyone.
The murder was the obvious thing—the big, loud, impossible-to-ignore thing.
But underneath it, there was all the rest: thirty years of criticizing me, of controlling Sal and George and Paula, of building a family on guilt and obligation and calling it love.
She hadn’t just died with a murderer unnamed.
She’d died with a whole life’s worth of things unsaid.
Maybe that’s why she was stuck to me specifically. Not just because I was the only one who could see her, but because I was the one she’d never bothered to see at all.
That was a depressing thought. I closed the book and went to the kitchen to make more coffee.
The recipe tin caught the afternoon light as I passed.
I ran my thumb along the dented lid. Nonna Rosa’s braciole.
Tammy had claimed it last night, said we were making it.
I hadn’t cooked a real meal in three months—just cereal and toast and whatever came in a can.
But the tin was here now, and the kitchen was mine, and maybe this weekend I’d open it up and try something.
Not for anyone else. Just because I wanted to.
I was standing at the counter, waiting for the coffee to brew when the knock came.
Three sharp raps. Confident. Not the coven—Lori would’ve called first, Tammy would’ve walked in without knocking, and Jill would’ve knocked and then immediately apologized for knocking too loud. This was someone else.
I set my mug down and went to the door, pausing at the hallway mirror out of habit. Just me. No ghosts.
Paula Ferraro was standing on my front porch with a bottle of wine and no invitation.
My first thought: good, I needed to talk to her anyway.
My second, half a beat later: why is she here?
I hadn’t called Paula. Hadn’t texted, hadn’t dropped hints at the benefit. I’d been planning to reach out, find some casual excuse to ask about the family. But she’d beaten me to it—tracked me down in a town she had no reason to visit, wine in hand like this was a social call.
Was it? Or had someone told her I’d been asking questions?
“Hey.” Paula stood, brushing off her jeans. Paint under her fingernails, cadmium yellow. Same leather jacket she’d worn to every family event for a decade—the one Rosaria called “inappropriate” at least thirty times. “I brought a Malbec and some of those crackers you like. The rosemary ones.”
She remembered the crackers. That caught me off guard.
“Paula, what are you doing here?”
“Checking on you.” She said it like it was obvious. “You left the house the other day looking like you were carrying something heavy. And nobody else in that family is going to check, so.”
I held the door open. “Come in.”
It was a bit early in the day for wine, but we ended up at the kitchen table with the Malbec and the rosemary crackers, talking about nothing for a few minutes—the drive, the weather, a gallery showing Paula had in Portland. Easy conversation.
But I was watching her. Every laugh, every reach for a cracker—I was sorting, trying to figure out if this was genuine or performance. Claudia had taught me what performance looked like. Paula was harder to read because she’d always been the honest one. Blunt, sometimes brutal, but honest.
That didn’t mean she couldn’t lie. Just that she’d be different about it.
“This place has good energy,” Paula said, turning her wine glass by the stem. She was looking at Aunt Amelia’s herbs, the books on the shelf. “I can tell things like that.”
I set my glass down. “What do you mean?”
Paula picked at the wine label. “After Rosaria died, I started having these—moments. Like déjà vu but sideways. I’d walk into a room and feel something that wasn’t mine. An emotion, a memory. Once I heard whispering in my studio and nobody was there.”
She looked up, and underneath the eyeliner and the tough-girl armor, she looked uncertain.
“It’s not strong. Nothing like full-on visions. Just flickers. Enough to make me drive two hours to ask my ex-sister-in-law if I’m losing it.”
“You’re not losing it,” I said. And meant it. “This town has a thing about it. I’m still figuring it out myself.”
Paula’s shoulders dropped an inch. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I poured her more wine. “Paula, can I ask you something? At the house—you said everyone’s just moving on. Do you really think that’s what’s happening?”
Her expression sharpened. The vulnerability tucked itself away, replaced by that Ferraro alertness.
“Nobody in that family moves on from anything,” she said. “They just redecorate around it.”
Paula was on her second glass when she set her wine down and leaned forward with her elbows on the table.