Chapter 1

It rains all night and into the morning. Sunlight creeps through the cloud cover, and the ocean is covered by a haze. Charlotte stands out on the balcony, underneath the overhang, where she avoids the brunt of the rain. The misty air chills her and she shivers slightly. Her bare feet feel the smooth, cold stone below her. She watches the ocean refill and rise. Spring marks the oncoming rains and the return of life, she knows, but she’s never quite thought about the ocean as part of that cycle.

Minerva had been so happy once. The way she recalled stories from 1926 so vividly. How she interacted with her friends. The way she talked about love. The looseness in her body. Charlotte knows something now about going quickly from stiff to loose. How a place like this can make that happen. Of course, she’d only known Minerva (if it can even be called “knowing”) for a matter of hours, maybe a day, prior to the party, but the difference in her demeanor during the toast was extraordinary.

Minerva was born, Charlotte guesses, in the 1890s. The pressure on her to be feminine, to get married, to serve her husband, must have been tremendous. She didn’t want that. She wanted to run off with her lesbian lover and start a matriarchal commune. So she did what made her happy. And she wouldn’t let anyone take away the things that made her happy.

She must have, at some point, realized the end was coming. All the possibilities that Lotus Valley offered her, her relationship with Lily, the chance to bring her dream to Europe, all of it. She must have felt it slipping away at some point, when the police raids started. Alex had explained the spell, how Minerva had to choose herself or Lily to stay behind. Charlotte can relate to that feeling of the walls closing in and time slipping away.