Page 77 of A Ghost’s Guide to Haunting a Witch

She searched the room for Theo, but he wasn’t there, and that absence hit her harder than anything else. Not the memories — they were still crashing into her in jagged, incomplete fragments. Not the nausea, or the way the room still felt like it was tilting slightly off-axis. It was him, not being here, when she needed him most.

“Theo?” Her voice broke on his name, thin and unsteady. “Theo—”

Silence rang out across the shop, though. No one was there. She was alone.

“Oh God,” she choked, her hands pressing against the floor like she could hold herself together by sheer force. “No. No, no, no—”

She knew now that the memories she’d visited were somehow her own. They were hers. All hers. And that meant . . .

He was mine. He was mine, and I don’t remember him. I was his girlfriend all along. It was me.

A sharp, sickening clarity settled in her stomach, and she curled into a ball on the floor. “What’s going on?” Augustine whispered. “What is this? If it was me all along, why can’t I remember him?”

Her lungs felt too tight, her breath coming too fast now, far too shallow for comfort.

Someone did this, she realized. Someone took him out of my life so completely that they took parts of me with him. Every memory, every moment, every piece of him that existed inside my head. Gone. Deleted from existence.

Every kiss. Every laugh. Every touch.

A broken sound escaped her.

“I forgot you,” she whispered, the words splintering as they left her mouth. “I forgot you. How could I have forgotten you?”

Dark magic, she realized. That’s what this is. Dark magic. Someone cast a spell on me. Cast a spell to remove him from my mind. But why? Why would a witch do that? What harm have I ever done, what harm has Theo ever done—?

Suddenly, a new and more horrifying thought crept into her brain. Worse, even, than the creeping certainty that this was dark magic, the like of which she’d never seen before.

Theo is dead. The man I loved — love — is dead. And I don’t remember how. I don’t remember why. I don’t remember the moment it happened, or where I was, or if I held him, or if he was alone, or if he called my name.

Augustine’s stomach twisted violently.

“I should know this,” she whispered, rocking slightly where she knelt. “I should know what happened to you. I should remember.”

There was nothing there, though, just a void where something vital should have been. Something important enough that someone decided she couldn’t be allowed to keep it, and her hands curled into fists against the floor.

“Who did this? Who took you from me and then took you from me again?”

Only silence answered, thick and unforgiving.

It wasn’t random, Augustine decided. Whoever did this to me — whoever did this to us — it was deliberate. Intentional.

It had to be. The memories that had been locked away were too specific. The gaps were too obvious. Theo had been carefully erased from her life and she from his, like someone went through their minds and cut each other out memory by memory, piece by piece.

Suddenly, something else rose up within her, sharp and aching and impossible to ignore: want. A longing for Theo so sharp it almost cut her soul with it. The need was immediate and physical and desperate. She wanted him here. Not as a fragment or echo of a memory, not as a half-remembered feeling that slipped through her fingers the moment she reached for them — but here. Beside her. Looking at her the way he had, saying her name like it meant something. She needed him to tell her what happened, to fill in the empty spaces someone had carved into her life, to make sense of the before and the after and the moment everything broke.

“Theo,” she whispered, softer now, but no less urgent. “Come back. Please. I don’t understand any of this without you.”

Augustine stood slowly, her breathing steadying slightly. “Theo,” she said again, softer now, like maybe if she said his name enough times it would bring him back. “You found me before,” she whispered into the empty room. “You can do it again.” Her throat tightened, and tears burned her eyes. “Please.”

There was still only silence, though. Still just an emptiness where Theo had earlier stood.

The disappointment settled in slowly and heavily, and Augustine let out a shaky breath, scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand before the tears could properly fall.

“Right,” she muttered, voice rough. “Of course.”

She turned away, pacing once, twice, like movement alone might shake something loose in her mind.

Suddenly, she stilled as a thought — as a memory — hit her.