Chapter One
Do you know what you never hear of in kids’ books? The wicked stepfather. The wicked stepmother gets the bad rap, but my stepmom is hilarious, loving, supportive, and makes the best lasagna in the country. I will fight you on this.
Wicked stepfather? Exhibit A: Arnie Patterson, spin doctor and quack doctor extraordinaire. Some people shouldn't be allowed to practice medicine. People like him.
Oh, well. It shouldn’t matter. I’m twenty-five. I should have been out of the house a long, long time ago, right?
“Agatha, you don't have to do this! Aggie! Baby, get back in the house, please!”
“Mom, you chose him over me. I absolutely do need to do this. My anxiety isn’t getting better living here.”
“You ended up in that place last time!” Mom hisses and chases me to my battered little Chevy with the mismatched panels.
That place. She can’t even say the name of the residential mental health facility I was in for six weeks during my senior year of college.
Pre-law with a business minor. Walked in on my then-boyfriend with his roommate in a decidedly un-platonic sleepover.
My meds were already feeling “weak,” and finals were putting pressure on me.
I snapped. I felt trapped, like there was only one way out—but I didn’t take it. I got help. I got better.
And now... I’m getting worse again. I’ve tried everything to make real progress, but whenever I do, Arnie finds a discreet way to torpedo me—and Mom won’t believe that.
The only thing to do is leave while I’m still sick. “All better” isn’t coming. “Strong enough to make my own choices” will have to do.
“Your father has the best medicine money can buy, Aggie! Something new. He’s sure it’ll help this time!” Mom follows me, frantic voice grating on my raw nerves.
Just like they “helped” the last time? No, sometimes when I’ve been doing great, I notice the change happens like walking off a cliff, a sudden steep drop-off, like my meds do nothing. Arnie swoops in and presses me to try something new—and the ugly spiral starts again.
“I’m not taking any more experimental drugs just because Arnie recommends them.” Another suitcase in. A cardboard box full of things that won’t fit in a suitcase next.
For a girl who lived the last four years of her life in the dorms and her childhood home, you’d think I would have a lot more stuff.
“Your father loves you! I don't know why you can't accept that. He's trying to help you. That place—”
“Auburn Acres saved my life, Mother.” I bite the word off and throw in the final box.
“And I know my father loves me. If he and June were in the country, I would be moving in with them, no doubt. They even offered to come home early, but I’m not going to do that to them. There are people worse off than me.”
I tell myself this a thousand times a day, holding my phone, begging myself not to crack and call my dad and stepmom.
They’re on a one-year medical missions trip to Central America.
Whenever I’m about to give and beg them to come home to Texas so I can leave New York and hide in the safety of their warm, earth-toned ranch house, I look at pictures of the villages they’re rebuilding, of the school where June is teaching girls to read, sew, and do first aid.
They’ll be back in January. Six months away. I can do this.
“Arnie has been in your life for ten years, Agatha Ann Habersett.”
“I know.” I bite my tongue and swallow my words. What I want to tell her is something I’ve told her a million times before—something she always waves off as being part of my “issues.”
Arnie works as a medical consultant for a pharmaceutical company.
I know that lots of things can go wrong when you're inventing a new medicine, but it strikes me as very strange that every time Arnie personally gets involved in a case, it's one where he has to travel to examine a young woman.
He always decides he needs to stay involved in her case, monitoring her by staying in the area for weeks—even months—always on the insurer's dime.
I find it even more strange that some of these drugs get pulled off the market with only a few years in action.
They take millions to make! Why isn’t he fired for approving drugs that end up putting people in comas or collapsing their lungs?
I don’t know why the company hasn’t been shut down.
Probably because desperate people want any straw they can clutch at.
I'm living proof. I'm desperate and clutching at straws, taking a job in a tiny town I’ve never heard of in a mountain chain I never even knew existed.
Maybe Arnie does something to the data, so they never connect the pieces. Maybe he has something on the researchers or the office bigwigs that keep them quiet.
He looks like such an ordinary guy—and I think that’s what makes him so scary to me.
I’m terrified to go—traveling two hours away and starting a whole new life—but I’m slightly more terrified to stay here.
Don’t think about that. Can’t think about that. Focus on getting out.
My anxieties are having anxieties as I pat my pockets for the tenth time this hour.
Keys.
Inhaler.
Epipen.
Spare glasses.
Brain cells—God, what am I doing??
“Aggie? Baby, come back inside. It’s starting to rain, and your mother needs to sleep before she leaves at the crack of dawn tomorrow!” Arnie comes out with a big smile and a bowl of buttery popcorn.
My weakness, damn his receding hairline.
But no bowl of double butter with extra salt is enough to make me stay alone with Arnie for three months while my mom goes to stay with my grandparents in Cardiff.
“I’m fine, Arnie. I’ve got a job and a place to stay. I’m twenty-five. I can do this.” My smile is wobbly and false.
“A place to stay? With who? You shouldn’t be left alone... After last time.”
They always make it sound like it just happened, never letting me have the victory of surviving past that moment.
“That was in college during the worst week of my life, three years ago. I’m still going to meet with my therapist on video calls.
” My voice barely shakes, but the tremors in my hands make me shove them in my hoodie pouch.
Arnie looks pissed—and that’s when I know that I really need to go.
He should look concerned, fine, but not angry.
He’s a doctor, but he never makes me feel better. In fact, sometimes I feel like I'm getting worse when he's around. I've even wondered if he is slipping me something or changing my meds right before I have those “drop-offs,” but...
But that’s part of my horrible mental health, he says. They all say. Paranoia. There is never any proof. Blood tests always come back normal.
“My therapist says I’m ready. Dad and June think I’m ready.”
“Dad and June haven’t seen you get fired from all three jobs you’ve had for taking too many days off for appointments and panic attacks,” Mom snaps.
“If I fail, then I fail. You get to gloat.” I shouldn’t be petty, but I can’t hold it in.
It’s the way they treat me like a baby, almost as if they want to keep me here, watching me lose this battle.
The half-obscured daylight glints off Arnie’s glasses, giving him grayed-out lenses as he squeezes my mother tightly to his side.
Creepy.
The paranoia.
Side effects.
If you’re considering self-harm, you need to stop this medicine... If you’re considering self-harm, you need to take this medicine...
“I’m not hurting myself by leaving,” I say in a firm, clear voice. It helps. I smile. That helps, too.
Visualize the best outcome.
I leave. Pine Ridge is a nice, cozy little town. The job as a paralegal at the Wymark Family and Business Law Practice will be a great way to use your degree, earn a good salary, and get a fresh start. The town will be welcoming. Pretty.
My shaking calms. Smile turns real.
Arnie is in front of me, hands on my shoulders, voice low enough that only I can hear. His eyes are visible through his glasses now, but I wish they weren’t. They’re smug and sparkling. They don’t match the tender, fatherly body language. They don’t match his voice, which is...
Malevolent. That’s the word.
“I know what you’re doing, Aggie. Don’t. Don’t waste your time.”
His words are soft, but they slice deep.
“Don’t try that manifesting crap. Behavioral modifications do squat. I’ve seen all you crazies try it, and the only thing that works is putting you in your place and curing that sick mind with pills that keep you there.”
I back up, but Arnie is the one who leaps back, looking stung. “Arla, I tried. I tried, honey. She won’t listen to me as a father or as a doctor. I’m going in the house.”
My mother puts her hands on her hips. “Aggie!”
“Mom—I...”
She hugs me with a heavy, begrudging sigh.
“I know you can’t see how you’re hurting us right now.
Go. Go with love and know you can always come back home.
Arnie will be here, and I’m just a call away.
” She pushes me back with a little half-sob and runs back into the house to comfort her distraught husband, the doctor.
I mean, the actor.
IT’S NOT GOOD TO CRY while driving. Even my audiobook filled with cozy cottage core witches and friendly fae folk battling to save their wooded glen from the “darkness” doesn’t distract me.
I relate, Witch Glenna. I feel you, Fae farmers and woodsmen.
I’m fighting to save my home from the darkness, too.
I sob and hiccup softly for two hours straight. Not even talking to June and Dad helps me stop.
“Hey. Hey, listen. Do you know what this is?” Dad’s voice crackles heavily from the remote satellite phone he uses to stay in touch.
“Mom choosing Arnie over me? Again?” I whimper. “I should never have left Texas. I should have stayed with you guys and gone to Texas A&M!”
“Sweetie, you did a great job getting your degree, and you would have done that anywhere. SUNY was close to your mom, and that was a great opportunity to reconnect with her. You can’t control how people treat you.
No, this? This is a milestone. This is your first time living alone, in your own place. Can you get a cat?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And paint?”
“I don’t want to paint.”
“Well, you can decorate in your own style. No more Mom’s rules. No more dorm rules. Not even my rules. You can take your Longhorns poster off the wall, and you don’t have to have your Texans’ bobbleheads on your bookshelf.”
I laugh for the first time in days. I can picture the aggrieved expression on my father’s face as he says that. “June, make sure they don’t revoke his Texan card for saying that.”
“I’m monitoring his heart rate right now, sweetie. We’re sending you fifty bucks. You go get yourself something beautiful. Something in just your style. Happy housewarming, Ags.”
My phone pings, and my e-pay app shows that June Habersett sent me fifty dollars.
Fifty dollars is like five hundred dollars to my parents and the people they help.
I won’t argue with them, but I’ll be sending forty back.
I used to go thrifting with June at the big permanent flea market in town.
I wonder if there’s anything like that in Pine Ridge?
“I’m gonna go thrifting,” I say firmly. Maybe hit some yard sales. Summer is the perfect time for yard sales,” I say. I realize my hiccups have stopped. My eyes are red, but they’re not leaking.
“Are you sure you have enough? First and last month’s rent? Money for all those things you forgot, like a vacuum cleaner, trash bags, and a plunger?” My practical father asks.
That’s one thing about living with my mom and Arnie for the past three years. I have worked off and on (and not just at three jobs, at like six!). I had plenty saved up—but I know it’s not enough to live on indefinitely. “I have enough saved up to get started, and I have a job lined up.”
“You know our house is on a long-term lease to one of the families in our church, but if you need to move home, we can tell them they need to get out sooner than January.”
“No! No, don’t do that. Well, not yet. Let’s just see. Pine Ridge might be just what I need.”