Spells for Forgetting

by Adrienne Young

“August Salt.” I froze, my gaze drifting back to the door. I knew the name. I knew it in my bones. In my blood. And the last time I’d spoken it aloud, I’d been eighteen years old.

There was magic in the air, thick and fragrant. I could feel it bubbling up from the earth like a spring.

Eloise had become the unwanted daughter of Henry Salt when she married his son Calvin, but Calvin had run off and left her when August was only a few years old.

Emery Blackwood was anything but simple.

It didn’t matter how far I went, the orchard and its scars had followed me.

I hadn’t seen a copy of the deed for the cottage, and I hadn’t been able to find one at my mom’s house in Prosper, either. If I was going to sell the property and cut the last of our ties to this place, I’d need it.

“Seems right that they should be buried out there together, don’t you think?” he said.

“The two of you were…that was no ordinary childhood love, Em,” she said, more carefully.

“You think I don’t know why you won’t marry Dutch?” she said, matching my tone. “You never wanted to get married because you couldn’t marry August. You didn’t want to have children because you couldn’t have his children.” She looked me right in the eye when she said it. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

“He was with Dutch that night.”

“They want someone to blame. They need someone to blame. This town made up their minds about August and it didn’t matter if there was evidence or not. He was guilty.”

And for the first time, the truth of the thing we’d never really talked about was laid bare between us. My father loved me, but there was more than one secret on this island.

The women had always been the ones pulling the strings on this island.

She looked up at me with dark blue eyes, the left one splashed with a burst of bright green. An imperfect seven-pointed star that Leoda told us was something called heterochromia.

It had never mattered what was said, because we always returned to each other. Like gravity.

“There are spells for breaking and spells for mending. But there are no spells for forgetting,” I warned her.

I’d been in love with August Salt since before I knew what the words meant. I don’t know

when it happened—the narrow space between seconds, when a spark like the birth of a hundred stars found a home in my blood. Since then, every day had been colored with the glittering light of it dragging me in its wake, pulling me beneath its surface. And I didn’t care. If this was what it was like to drown, then for the rest of my life, I didn’t want to take another sip of air.

But Emery and I had always been something that didn’t make sense, and I’d lived long enough without her to worry about the risk of sounding like an idiot.