Chapter 32
Cora
Ten Years Ago
She doesn’t tell Jess about the potion. She doesn’t mention the little nudge, how she meddled in Carrie’s and Tom’s lives, thinking it would fix everything. For a time, of course, it did. Carrie had a first love, a best friend, and a wider circle of other people who accepted her, cared about her, and gave her the kind of teen years she craved. But now it’s all unraveling, and all she can do is try to reverse it.
Cora pauses for a moment, takes a deep, unhurried breath. The air is swampy and thick, promising a thunderstorm in a few days, and with every step up the mountain crickets sing to mark her way. It’s the kind of night she lives for—the velvet dark so close it feels like a caress, the song of wild things, the mountains bathed in silver from a full, beautiful moon. But she doesn’t appreciate it tonight. All she can think about, all she sees, is Carrie.
When Jess tapped at the door, eyes red, skin pale and taut, she fed her homemade lemonade and cookies and promised her she would take care of it. Promised her that her two best friends wouldn’t leave Woodsmoke for good. She held Jess’s hand, then sent her on her way before leafing through the book, poring over workings and stories. It all came back to this, back to her. Back to the potion, the little nudge, and the fact that she had to undo it all . . . then cross her fingers that Carrie and Tom’s love was real and Carrie would stay in Woodsmoke for him.
She rounds the corner in the trail, reaching the lookout, and leans against a tree, staring down at the town below. Five days. Just five days until Carrie will marry Tom. If she doesn’t truly love him, it could be the biggest mistake of her life. Cora knows she shouldn’t have let it get this far. She should have reversed the potion long ago, allowed Carrie to view Tom with clear eyes and see for herself whether she truly loves him. But it was so easy to let it be between them. So easy to see the path before Carrie winding forward into the future, a future of love and acceptance and the book.
But . . . love doesn’t work that way. It can’t be forced; it can’t be tricked.
She opens the book, which she’s been clutching against her chest, and turns to the page containing a reversal. It was recorded by Tabitha, her grandmother, to reverse a working for a dry season. There had been a drought in Woodsmoke that year, she wrote, and she lost ten years of her life to the working to bring the clouds. When she made the bargain to reverse it, the rain pattered on Tabitha’s head, gathering in the deepening wrinkles lining her face. When she got home, she looked in the mirror and realized that the mountains had taken ten more years from her.
Cora pulls out a pocketknife, pierces her thumb, and lets the blood drip, drip, drip into the loam. She makes her request of the mountains, just as it says to do in the book, and braces herself for what they will take from her.