Kate Alice Marshall

“No,” the girl said. When he told the story, Leo would linger on this part. The way she stared right through him, like there was nothing but a ghost behind her eyes. “But our friend is dead.”

“I know why she was calling,”

What does that even mean, you found her?

I’ll tell you, but only in person.

I’m not going back.

We owe it to her.

I might have been the one who discovered Persephone, but Cassidy was the one who made her ours.

I ran my finger along the scar that skated down the inside of my left wrist. That one didn’t belong to Stahl. It belonged to Persephone.

We’d never told a soul about what lay in the woods, about those beautiful bones.

People aren’t going to want to hold their business retreat at a lodge owned by a woman who hid a body for twenty years. And good luck booking any weddings, Naomi.”

“It’s not going to be like that,” Olivia said, tone turning desperate.

That she was more than the bones we’d found in the forest, and the magic we’d made from them.

But why should she be able to leave the woods, when I never had?

Liv and Cass had been afraid that if people found out about Persephone, they wouldn’t believe us about Stahl. They would think that we were liars.

I was afraid they would find out that I was one. Because Persephone wasn’t the only secret I’d been keeping all this time. I’d lied to the police. I’d lied on the stand. I’d lied to myself, told myself I’d seen Alan Michael Stahl in those woods—and maybe there was even a time I’d believed it.

But the truth was, I hadn’t seen him that day.

I hadn’t seen anything at all.