She refused again, but not for defiance. She refused because the ledger was not hers to share. It contained names bound by the soft magic of human dignity; to publish it would be to auction off other people's losses.

They insisted they only wished to negotiate "the ethics of intervention." But their ethics were made of ledger lines and little boxes. They wanted rules so that favors could be cataloged, taxed, and turned into a commodity. They proposed a register of beneficiaries. They brought a contract with margins narrow as knives.

It was not.

The wolves continued to prowl. They did not find the map. The priest's fury softened into ambivalence and then, predictably, into charity. People forgot the fear that had motivated them like everyone forgets an older cold. But the town never quite returned to the small complacency it had enjoyed before. It had a scar, like a contraction in the muscle of its self-regard.

I wrote because a life that contains a witch should not be left to rumor. If I were ever questioned—by grief, by disbelief, by friends who meant well and police who regarded unusualness as polite fiction—my pen would be the slow, inexorable force that proved what we had been: real.

Weeks later, Rob stopped showing up for work. The cigarettes grew dusty in his pack. He started leaving messages on my phone with only a single line: "She remembers too much." Once, he wrote: "The coin is warm."

"Elsewhere." She paused, and for a beat the lamp's flame tipped toward her palm like a moth. "Or simply away from being your sister."

"You left," I accused.

The request should have been a simple one: find the lost music, return it. But my sister counted the cost on the backs of her fingers like a debt collector.