8
HALEY
I wanted to hate it.
The lawn was overgrown, the paint chipping, and the humidity so thick my hair needed its own zip code.
But the sight of Elian’s butter-yellow mansion made my heart ache with longing.
He’d stolen it. The future we’d always planned. The dream we’d created together.
A new life in a city drenched with magick that made our skin tingle. An old home in the Garden District—an original we could restore from the ground up. Businesses in the Quarter—a club for him, a witchy café and bookstore for me. Music and revelry floating on the air at night, the song of crickets drifting through the windows, the soundtrack of a beautiful life.
Had this house always been his—some weird double life he’d never confessed to? All the lovely pictures he’d painted in my mind… Was it
