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A man wearing a red baseball cap, aviator sunglasses, and running clothes whistled a tune as he walked up the sidewalk toward Mattie. Sweat glistened on his face and arms. He played imaginary drums in the air above him, and his grin caught the sunlight. Mattie watched him for a few seconds, envious of his ability to lose himself in a moment of joy. She moved out of his way and stood by the driver's door. The man stopped a few feet away, lowered his arms, and turned to look at Mattie as she slid behind the wheel and closed the car door. He stared at her for a moment, rubbed the back of his neck, and then continued in the opposite direction.

Mattie buckled her seat belt and turned on the ignition. The radio came on, playing "I Put a Spell on You." A buried memory tried to unearth itself, but her exhaustion halted it. She drove out of Chicago toward the only town she'd ever repeatedly visited: Ivy Ridge, Georgia.

* * *

The drive south to Ivy Ridge would take at least fourteen hours, and since Mattie hadn't planned to leave until midmorning, Penelope insisted Mattie stop halfway, book a hotel room, and sleep. But Mattie was restless, and when she stopped for too long, even to pump gas, her mind filled with despair and thoughts of her mom, creeping her closer to the edge of collapse.

She and Lilith had spontaneously traveled to new places dozens of times without a solid plan, and Mattie never worried about the lack of preparation. Lilith's style of planning was hoping for the best and going with the flow, but this unplanned trip to Ivy Ridge felt different in the worst kind of way. Even when she didn't know where they were going, Mattie always trusted her mom. Somehow Lilith had a knowing about what lay ahead of them. Whenever and wherever they arrived, Lilith would have everything arranged like there had been a plan.

But Mattie didn't have a plan; she didn't even have a speck of knowing. She felt completely untethered, like someone had cut her kite string during a tornado. Her future had suddenly been swallowed up by the vast nothingness gobbling up every part of her—except her sadness. The nothingness left that, as though despair was something too heavy for even it to take. Her grief expanded while her world shrank.

She'd lost her sole companion, her best friend, and her mom. All at once.

Being an only child raised by a free-spirited single mom had felt like a spectacular gift, until this moment when she was abandoned. Her aunt would argue that Mattie wasn't alone because she had family in Ivy Ridge—the small Russell family unit. Although Lilith didn't talk much about her hometown, she'd shared plenty of stories about their extraordinary family, explaining numerous times that the Russells weren't like other families. You'd never catch them doing ordinary things. Generations of Russells would be more likely to walk barefoot in the moonlight, grow extravagant gardens, and keep prisms near windows. They burned homemade candles while reading fairy tales and novels about ancient civilizations. Russell women opened doors to unexpected guests before anyone even rang the bell, they knew which herbs healed and which ones harmed, and they could see the secret truths in your heart.

Lilith swore the Russell family was enchanted, if a little unusual. Mattie couldn't deny the strangeness she'd seen in their lives. Others believed these whispers about the Russell women, and so in Ivy Ridge they were often met by those pretending indifference though inwardly burning with curiosity. Were the Russells magical or just peculiar? Did they sew courage into clothing or have singing voices that caused men to fall in love with them like the mythological Sirens?

Ivy Ridge, Georgia, was a place Lilith spent as little time in as possible since she'd escaped on a Greyhound bus when she was eighteen. Lilith rarely talked to Mattie about her life in Ivy Ridge, only once admitting that she had never fit in with the locals. Not with her blue-streaked hair, and certainly not with her uncanny ability to charm other people's boyfriends and husbands. Being different in a small Southern town was worse than wearing white after Labor Day—an unfortunate circumstance that people couldn't help but gossip about. Combined with her bohemian beauty and her candidness, the likelihood of Lilith being widely accepted in Ivy Ridge was about as probable as someone being struck by lightning.

But Ivy Ridge was where Penelope still lived in the family home—a place Lilith had used when the walls around her felt too close and her lungs squeezed tight, when she needed a retreat from parenting. Rather than feeling discarded when Lilith dropped her off, Mattie loved her time there with Penelope every summer. To her, running rampant through the quirky Victorian home was the best sort of fun. She anticipated summers the same way children vibrated with excitement for Christmas morning.