Chapter 12

The food was almost done in the kitchen of her childhood home. The smell brought back pleasant memories.

Posy stood at the stove with a wooden spoon in one hand, listening to the radio on the counter and stirring the sauce, the one with roasted tomatoes, paprika, and honey. Mushrooms, peppers, and sweet onions sautéed in the pan beside it. It was the dish her father used to make for the two of them: rice, vegetables, and that sauce. He had never written the recipe down. Posy had spent most of her spare time reconstructing it from memory, until one day she tasted it and felt she’d gotten it right.

Today was their birthdays. She was turning twenty-nine, and her dad was turning fifty-four.

She tapped the spoon against the rim of the pot and let her eyes drift to the cabinet doors above the stove, where a photograph of her mother hung beside the circle with the vertical line down the middle, the symbol of the Hollows faith. Elizabeth stood beside a stream, laughing at something outside the frame, her long brown hair blowing in the wind. She had died in a car accident when Posy was young. She had been coming back from the grocery store when a hit-and-run driver killed her.