Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nick was standing on my porch holding a grocery store bouquet and looking like he'd rather be anywhere else on Earth.
"Hey, Mom."
Two words. Two words I hadn't heard from my son in over a year.
He stood there in his dental school jacket with his father's face and his grandmother's stubborn jaw, gripping those cellophane-wrapped carnations like a life preserver, and I wanted to cry and hug him and shake him and ask him why it took someone trying to kill me for him to show up.
Instead I said, "Those are pretty."
"They're cheap. The good ones were sold out." He shifted his weight. "Can I come in?"
I held the door open.
It had been five days since the fire on Marsh Road. Five days since Claudia was arrested. Five days since the Ferraro family had its foundation cracked open and everyone had to decide what to do with the rubble.
George was devastated. Carmen told me he'd barely spoken since the arrest—just sat in his den with the door open for once, staring at his half-finished model planes.
When the police recovered the diary from Claudia's closet—she'd kept it, couldn't bring herself to destroy leverage she might need later, which said everything about who she really was—George had asked not to read it.
"I don't want to know what Mom knew about me," he'd told Carmen. "I just want to know it's over."
It wasn't over, not for him. But the truth was out, and he was grateful for that in the stunned, hollow way that people are grateful when the surgeon says they got it all.
Paula had called the morning after. No pleasantries, no preamble—just Paula.
"You almost died."
"I'm aware."
"Thank you." Her voice caught. "For not giving up. Even when it looked like me." A pause. "The diary—my secret—"
"It's evidence now. Sealed." I'd confirmed this with Tony. Whatever Rosaria had written about Paula and everyone else was locked in an evidence room, not circulating through the family grapevine. "Nobody's reading it."
The sound she made wasn't quite crying. It was relief exiting the body, twenty years of held breath finally released.
And then, two days ago, Josie had called.
My firstborn, who'd called me a selfish monster and sided with her father and refused to speak to me for over a year.
The call lasted four minutes. She wasn't friendly—that was too much to ask, too soon.
But she was less hostile. She said she'd been asking Carmen questions for weeks — about the marriage, about what it was really like, about things she'd refused to hear when I'd tried to tell her myself.
She said she was sorry she'd needed her sister's version to believe mine, and the word sorry came out rough, like she'd had to peel it off something.
She said she'd spent fourteen months performing loyalty to her father and she didn't know how to stop, but she was trying.
"I looked at Dad before I looked at you," she said. "Every time. At the house, at the funeral, everywhere. I kept checking if he was watching. I didn't even realize I was doing it until Carmen pointed it out."
I told her I understood. I told her I'd spent thirty years doing the same thing.
She said she needed time. I told her I had plenty.
Now Nick sat at my kitchen table drinking coffee and not quite meeting my eyes.
"I should have called," Nick said. He was turning his mug the same way Tony did—rotating it in his hands, giving himself something to do.
"After the divorce, after Nonna died. I should have called and I didn't and that was—" He stared into his coffee.
"I took the easy road. Dad was right there and you were up here and it was easier to just.. ."
"Not choose," I said.
"Not choosing is choosing. I know that now."
Carmen caught my eye from the phone screen and gave me a look that said don't push it, let him get there. Twenty-three years old and already the wisest person in the family.
Nick left an hour later with a hug that lasted longer than any hug he'd given me since he was twelve. Awkward. Sorry. Real. Baby steps. I'd take them.
Tuesday night. Bayberry House. The coven gathered for the last time as an emergency response team and the first time as whatever came next.
Tammy had made enchiladas. Jill had brought a bottle of champagne that she'd opened with only minor telekinetic assistance—the cork shot across the room and embedded itself in the wall, but nobody was hit, which counted as progress.
"So," Tammy said, topping off everyone's glass. "What now?"
I'd been thinking about this. Between the family calls and the police statements and the sleepless nights, I'd been turning it over—what my life looked like on the other side of solving a murder and nearly dying in a fire.
"I controlled it," I said. "The fire. At the end, I actually controlled it.
Not perfectly—I know that. But I held on when it mattered.
" I looked at Lori. "You said powers awaken during transitions.
Mine came with menopause and a murder investigation and my entire life falling apart.
But they're here now. They're mine. And I think—" I set my glass down.
"I think I want to do something useful with them.
The medium thing, the fire thing—there are other people out there going through what I went through.
What we all went through. Scared, confused, thinking they're losing their minds. "
"You want to help them," Lori said. Not a question.
"You helped me. Amelia helped you. Isn't that how it works?"
Lori's smile was small and warm and—I could swear—proud. "That's exactly how it works."
"Besides," Jill said, "I still break things when I sneeze. Someone needs to stick around for property damage control."
Tammy raised her glass. "To the coven. Still standing. Slightly scorched."
We clinked. The champagne was good. The enchiladas were better. And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Tony pulled up to the cottage at sunset. I heard his car before I saw it—that particular rumble of a sedan that needed a new muffler, which he’d probably been meaning to fix for three years.
He found me on the porch with a cup of coffee. Real coffee, strong, no decaf. He sat down on the step next to me without being invited, the way you sit next to someone when the formality has burned off and what’s left is just two people.
“Came to close the case,” he said.
“On my porch?”
“Seemed appropriate.” He pulled a folded paper from his jacket—some kind of official form, signatures at the bottom. “Claudia’s been charged. First-degree murder. The DA’s confident. Between the diary, the financial records, and her confession at the scene—“ He tucked the paper away. “It’s solid.”
The sun was dropping behind the pines, turning the sky orange and pink. The ocean was calm. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked.
“I believe you now,” Tony said. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the ocean, or pretending to. “About all of it.”
“The ghosts?”
“Everything.” He said it quietly, the way you say things you’ve been carrying for a while and have finally decided to set down.
“I don’t understand it. Probably never will.
But I saw what I saw in that house, and I’ve spent enough years as a cop to know the difference between something I can’t explain and something that isn’t real. ”
I watched the side of his face. The silver at his temples. The lines around his eyes. The five o’clock shadow that I was starting to think was just his face.
“I’m terrified,” I said. “Of what I’m becoming. I set things on fire with my mind, Tony. I see dead people. I’m fifty-two years old and I don’t know what I am.”
He turned to look at me then. Those brown eyes, deep-set and tired and warmer than he wanted anyone to know.
“I’m terrified of what I’m feeling,” he said.
The words sat between us. The sunset painted the porch in gold. Neither of us moved for a long moment—the kind of moment where everything balances on a wire and the slightest breath could tip it either way.
Then he leaned in, or I leaned in, or we both did at the same time, and his mouth was on mine and it was a little awkward because our noses bumped and I was still holding my coffee cup and his hand landed on my knee and then moved to my jaw and then the awkwardness burned off and it was just warmth.
His warmth and mine, and mine didn’t set anything on fire, it just—was.
Real and solid and a little desperate and exactly right.
When we pulled apart he kept his hand on my jaw for a second, thumb against my cheekbone, and looked at me with an expression I hadn’t seen directed at me in so long I’d forgotten what it felt like.
“That was—“
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
We sat on the porch and watched the last of the sunset, his shoulder against mine. The coffee went cold. I didn’t care.
In the glass of the front door behind us, Rosaria’s reflection watched. For once, she said nothing.
Later. The sky was dark. Tony had gone home with a promise to call tomorrow and a second kiss by his car that was less awkward and more intentional and made my toes curl inside my shoes.
I was alone on the porch when Rosaria appeared in the window beside me. Not the kitchen window, not the bathroom mirror—just the dark glass of the cottage window, her reflection sitting next to mine like two women at the end of a long day.
She didn’t speak right away. We watched the ocean together—or I watched it and she watched its reflection, which was maybe a metaphor for something but I was too tired to figure out what.
“I am not going to apologize,” she said finally. “For thirty years. You know that.”
“I know that.”
“I was who I was. I said what I said. I do not believe in revisionist history.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
She smoothed down her spectral cardigan. Adjusted her pearls. All the little gestures of a woman composing herself.
“But you are stronger than I thought.” She said it carefully, like each word cost her something. “Maybe I was wrong about you.”
From Rosaria Ferraro, that was practically a declaration of love.
Thirty years of criticism and disapproval, and “maybe I was wrong about you” was as close to an apology as she’d ever get.
I knew that. And somehow, sitting on this porch in the dark with the taste of Tony’s coffee still on my lips, it was enough.
“You’re not crossing over,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“Not yet.” She looked out at the dark water—or at its reflection in the glass. “There is more unfinished business in this family. More secrets. That diary was just the beginning.” Her jaw set in that stubborn Ferraro line.
“That sounds ominous.”
“It is ominous. I was married to a Ferraro for fifty-three years. Ominous is the family default.”
I laughed. Actually laughed. And Rosaria’s reflection—I could’ve sworn—almost smiled.
“You are stuck with me,” she said. “At least for a little while longer.”
I looked at my own reflection in the window.
Dark hair with silver streaks. Brown eyes, a little tired.
No dark circles tonight. I looked like a woman who’d survived something and come out different on the other side.
Not perfect, not finished, but different.
Better, maybe. Or at least more herself.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I am.”
I was surprisingly okay with that.
Inside, the cottage was warm. Aunt Amelia’s books lined the shelves. The herbs hung in the kitchen. The mirrors in the spare bedroom were still covered, but maybe tomorrow I’d pull the sheets off. See who else was out there, waiting to be heard.
Fifty-two years old. Divorced. Menopausal. A medium who set things on fire. Haunted by her dead mother-in-law. Kissed by a detective who believed in ghosts. Surrounded by a coven of women who caught her when she fell.
My real life was just getting started.