Page 4 of The Mirror

“Cleo called.”

“Cleo called,” she murmured.

Cleo, her closest friend for a decade. Cleo, who’d moved into the manor with her without hesitation even knowing it held a curse, ghosts, and a crazed dead witch.

Being Cleo, Sonya decided, those elements had served as some extra motivation rather than any sort of deterrent. But then Cleo’s Creole grandmother was a self-proclaimed witch—the good kind.

With the dogs, his Mookie and her Yoda, flanking them, Trey led her down to the main floor.

At the base of the stairs, she paused to look at the portrait of Astrid Grandville Poole. The first bride, so lovely, so tragic in her white dress.

“It started with her. Everything that’s happening now started with her, and on her wedding day in 1806. When Hester Dobbs murdered her and pulled the ring from her finger.

“It has to end with me. It has to.” She looked up at him, into those deep blue eyes she’d come to trust.

“You came. Cleo called, and you came. After three in the morning.”

“Of course I came.”

“But… you were with a client. The hospital.” It flooded back. “Oh, that poor woman. Her husband—ex-husband—attacked her. Her kids—”

“They’re okay.” He kept his voice soothing. She was still so pale. “They’re all going to be okay. Don’t worry.”

“You were worried. And so angry. I could hear it when you called to tell me.”

“Her mom and sister are with her now.” Trey turned her, steered her back toward the kitchen. “The police have him, and she’s with her family. The kids are with them.”

“And you’ll take care of the rest, because that’s what you do. Not just the lawyer business. Taking care’s what you do.” She tipped her head toward his shoulder as they walked. “I feel a little off.”

“Really? I can’t imagine why.”

He turned on the kitchen lights, noted the fire crackling in the kitchen hearth, another roaring in the huge dining room.

Bringing the light, bringing the warmth. He wasn’t the only one taking care.

Then he led Sonya to the table. “Sit. Do you want wine? Tea? Water?”

“Whiskey.” She blew out a breath.

He thought of Owen getting a bottle only a few hours before when he’d needed to vent out that worry and anger, and all the frustration that came with it, to a friend.

“It seems to be the night for it.”

With the worst of the cold fading as the fires snapped, she watched Trey get out biscuits for the hovering dogs, set out one for Owen’s dog, Jones, before he walked into the butler’s pantry, easy and confident in jeans and flannel shirt.

Like the first time she’d met him when he’d shown her through the manor, she mused with her head still swimming. The third-generation, long-limbed, lanky lawyer with his black hair, his deep blue eyes.

His seemingly infinite patience.

He knew the house as well as she did—better, she corrected. He’d roamed its rooms and hallways, welcomed from childhood on by the uncle she’d never known she’d had. Her father’s twin—the classic separated at birth.

But they’d met through that same mirror, hadn’t they? Those twins. As children, as men. Both artists, both so much alike in so many ways. Twin memory, Cleo called it.

One to become Andrew MacTavish of Boston, son of loving parents, husband of a loving wife, father of a loved and loving daughter. All of whom mourned and remembered him.

And one to grow up a Poole of Poole’s Bay, to inherit the thriving family business, to inherit and live in the manor, as the son of a woman who was really his aunt, and all at the cold-blooded whim of the matriarch, Patricia Poole.

Just thinking about all of it hurt her mind, her heart. She covered her face with her hands, breathing slow as she tried to steady herself.

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