The cake was still on the kitchen counter, and Harvey Kinkle had already gone home.

Sabrina pulled the quilt up to her chin and stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, at the water stain shaped like nothing in particular, at the faint crack in the plaster that had been there since she was twelve. Her throat felt scraped raw, the way it did after screaming, except she hadn’t screamed. She hadn’t done much of anything. She’d stood there on the porch in her stupid birthday dress with the stupid little bows on the shoulders, and she’d said okay, and she’d let him walk away.

Okay. Like it was nothing. Like he hadn’t just stood in her foyer with his hands in his pockets and told her—in that careful, rehearsed voice, the one he used when he was about to say something he’d practiced in the mirror—that he didn’t think they should see each other anymore.

It’s not you, he’d said. Which was the oldest lie in the book, mortal or witch, and they both knew it.

The tears came again without permission. She pressed the heel of her hand against her eye socket, hard enough that colors bloomed behind her lids. Stupid. She was so stupid. She’d made a wish when she blew out the candles—she’d wished for him, for them, for the whole stupid mortal life she kept pretending she could have—and the universe had answered by taking him away on the same night.

Eighteen. She was eighteen years old and the Dark Lord was waiting and her aunts had given her a tarot deck and a silver athame and she was supposed to be thinking about her baptism, about the path, about the coven, and instead all she could think about was the way Harvey’s hand had felt in hers at the Greendale carnival last fall, warm and calloused and a little sweaty, and how he’d bought her cotton candy even though they were too old for it.

She rolled onto her side and pulled her knees up. The pillow was wet. She could smell her own shampoo on it, jasmine and something darker underneath, something that was just her, and the smell made it worse somehow because it reminded her that she was still here, still Sabrina Spellman, still half-witch, still alone.

He’d said it wasn’t about the magic. He’d said that too. It’s not about what you are. But she’d seen the way he flinched when Ambrose conjured the candles at dinner—just a little, just enough—and she’d watched his eyes go flat and careful when Zelda mentioned the solstice. He was afraid. Not of her, maybe, but of everything around her. Of what she was becoming. Of the things she couldn’t stop becoming even if she wanted to.

And she didn’t want to. That was the worst part. She didn’t want to stop, and he knew it, and that was why he was leaving.

The sobs came in waves now, ugly and shaking, the kind that made her ribs ache. An hour later, she was asleep.